README
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· Automate your dev environments! ·
A tool that automates the creation of development environments on the cloud, powered by Kubernetes.
Table of contents
Motivation
During my years of studying and working in the software engineering field, I had many reaccuring problems that made it harder for me to be as productive as possible. Among these problems, there was one that seemed particularly hard to solve in a simple, reliable and replicable way, it's the setup of development environments.
Back in school, I've noticed that this was a real problems because as beginners, my classmates and I often had problems with the initial setup of our environments either because we couldn't install the tools we needed (compilers, CLI tools, databases ...) successfully on our machines because of our lack of familiarity with these tools, or because our personal machines weren't powerful enough to work on some types of projects comfortably.
This continued to be a problem I had even after I started my final year internship, where I often had to work with projects that were either too big, because they were composed of multiple microservices and databases that I had to run simultaniously on my local machine, or too old, because they require older versions of certain runtimes to be executed which made it harder to manage all the versions of these runtimes locally.
That's when I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if there was a tool that can manage all this complexity and make the process of provisionning development environments simpler and more straightforward? Would that even be possible? As it turns out the answer to both of these questions is Yes! AutoDev is the tool that makes it possible to do all of this by providing an abstraction layer over a set of Kubernetes resources that it creates in the Kubernetes cluster where it's deployed.
Features
Using AutoDev, you can create sessions that represent development environments. Each session is composed of a number of components that represent the development tools that are needed to work on the project in question. These are processes like an online IDE, a database, a cache server, a self hosted 3rd party service ... Each session has persistant storage where the developer can store code, configuration files, db data ...The sessions can be stopped or deleted just like most cloud resources you can manage on public cloud providers.
Session components can be provisioned with as much computing resources as you will need to work on your dev projects, making it easier than ever to handle compute intensive workloads without sacrificing productivity.
AutoDev exposes a REST API that makes it possible to manage sessions by sending HTTP requests. The OpenAPI documentation of AutoDev will soon be released.
The features that distinguishe AutoDev from public cloud providers, that are also capable of creating databases and servers automatically, are its ability to provide browser based code editors (or IDEs) that are preconfigured with the tools that you requested, and its simplicity, because it makes the provisioned environment very similar to what a traditional equivalent local environment would be (with all of the requested services accessible on localhost from within the in-browser IDE).
Architecture
Scope
AutoDev does not (and will not) handle the system's users, billing informations, session quotas...The only things that it manages are the sessions (aka development environments) and their underlying Kubernetes resources. This means that for production use cases, it must be deployed either as a microservice inside a project, or behind an ApiGateway that acts as a middleware for managing these out of scope functionalities.
Usage
Setup
Development
By default (on non-production environments), AutoDev will attempt to connect to an etcd database on localhost:2379. To set it up either install etcd on your local machine or start it inside a docker container using the following command:
docker run -d -p 2379:2379 -p 2380:2380 -e ALLOW_NONE_AUTHENTICATION=yes --name Etcd bitnami/etcd
Your must also configure kubectl access to a Kubernetes cluster that you want
AutoDev to create resources in. You will need the following permissions in the
default namespace of this cluster:
- On
Deployments:["get", "delete", "list", "create"] - On
Services:["get", "delete", "create"] - On
Ingresses:["get", "update"]
Your can then start the project by running the following command:
go run ./cmd/main/main.go
The REST API will be available on localhost:8080.
Production
There are 2 main ways AutoDev can be deployed in for production environments, either inside or outside the Kubernetes cluster in which it will be creating resources. The docs for these 2 deployment methods will soon be added.
Example usage
Let's say you want to create a development environment that's composed of a code
editor, a Redis database for cache, and a MongoDB database for your application
data. To create this environment using AutoDev you need to follow these steps
(you need to have it running on localhost:8080)
- Initialize a new session named
test:
curl --location --request POST 'http://localhost:8080/init/test'
- Create the components you need in this session:
curl --location --request POST 'http://localhost:8080/create/test' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
"components": [
{
"componentType": "code",
"exposeComponent": true,
"componentID": "my-code-editor",
"componentMetadata": {
"Password": ""
}
},
{
"componentType": "redis",
"exposeComponent": false,
"componentID": "my-redis",
"componentMetadata": {
"Password": ""
}
},
{
"componentType": "mongo",
"exposeComponent": false,
"componentID": "my-mongo",
"componentMetadata": {
"Password": ""
}
}
]
}'
- Fetch the state of your session:
curl --location --request POST 'http://localhost:8080/refresh/test'
The response will look like this:
{
"message": "session test refreshed successfully",
"result": {
"sessionState": "running",
"components": [
{
"componentType": "code",
"exposeComponent": true,
"componentID": "my-code-editor",
"componentMetadata": {
"Url": "test.my-code-editor.hamzaboudouche.tech"
}
},
{
"componentType": "redis",
"exposeComponent": true,
"componentID": "my-redis",
"componentMetadata": {
"Password": ""
}
},
{
"componentType": "mongo",
"exposeComponent": true,
"componentID": "my-mongo",
"componentMetadata": {
"Password": ""
}
}
]
}
}
Notice the URL of the code editor; you can use it to access the session using a GUI similar to VsCode directly from your browser, without installing any additional tools.
License
AutoDev is MIT licensed.
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