gdev

gdev is a toolkit for building an application for your team to help automate and simplify your developer experience.

While gdev contains various runnable examples, the real use case for it is to create your own application, built using its components, that is setup for your team's development stack.

gdev understands & has components to help with:

• Setting up a new developer system ("bootstrap")
• Having a "stack" you run composed of infrastructure and application services
• Only running a subset of those services depending on what you are doing at any given moment
• Selecting whether to run each service from an artifact (container image, etc.), local source code, or in a debugger
• Building (e.g. compiling) services before starting them when running from local source code.
• Useful helper tools to support the above

Typically you would create your own xdev tools that pulls in gdev and the addons your stack needs. Your main() would configure those addons, and any custom ones, and then call the gdev/cmd.Main() to run the app. Several examples of how to build such apps are available under examples, including examples/gdev which has (nearly) all addons enabled, but only has infrastructure, not app, services defined.

Infrastructure

gdev provides building blocks for several common pieces of infrastructure for running your stack:

• Docker
• Containerd
• Kubernetes
• K3S as the Kubernetes environment
  • Using either containerd or Docker as the backend
• A generic process manager daemon for running & monitoring local processes
• Databases and other "infrastructure" services to support your app
• Recipes for how to compile your code before running it when running from local source (instead of pre-built containers)
  • And APIs for you to provide custom recipes

You can also configure your own infrastructure services. All the infrastructure services gdev provides are implemented using exported APIs, access to gdev internals is not required.

Your Services

When you create your application using gdev, you configure the stack of your applications you want to run. gdev provides helpers to make this easy, especially for common scenarios.

As initial examples, gdev knows how to build some simple project types:

• Go
  • using go build ./..., understanding how to just build select sub-directories
  • using mage or go tool mage
• NodeJS
  • using npm run build
  • using rush (https://rushjs.io)
• More to come soon

More will be added, and like the infrastructure services, these capabilities are implemented using only exported APIs, so you can also add your own custom build patterns.

Helper Tools

GOBUILDCACHE

gdev contains a set of addons to provide a GOBUILDCACHE implementation with pluggable remote backends. Included are backends for HTTP, GCS, S3, and SFTP. You can also provide your own backends by registering implementations of some interfaces.

Diags

A "diags" addon is available to help collect information from your users on demand to diagnose problems with their development environment. A baseline set of collectors is provided, along with an API for you to provide additional collectors.

The result is a .tgz of the various files & collected data. Where this goes is up to you. The addon comes with code to simply store it locally in a temp file that the user can send manually, but an API is provided so you could, for example, upload it to a storage bucket or other cloud destination to simplify the workflow.

Custom Commands

Your development environment probably benefits from some helper automation for common tasks. gdev makes it easy to bundle these by allowing you to add any custom commands you want to it. Need a DB cleanup tool to reset things between runs? Just write some Go code for it and wire it up.

Bloat

While gdev contains helper code for working with many systems, including them all can cause major binary bloat. When building your gdev-based command, the addon pattern means that your tool (once compiled) will only include the dependencies needed for the components you use. Don't use Kubernetes in your stack? No worries, your binary won't be bloated by its large client SDK. Addons with large dependencies are broken out into separate modules, so your build also won't have to download those unused modules.

Addons

The full list of addons you can enable when building your xdev tool is in the addons README

Usage

The general idea of how you use an xdev tool built with gdev is:

1. You download & install an initial version of xdev
2. You run xdev bootstrap to configure your machine (once)

Then each development cycle:

1. You use xdev _FIXME_ to choose which services you are runing/debugging
2. You run xdev start to start the stack
3. You do your work
4. You run xdev stop to stop the stack

This will be fleshed out with more capabilities soon.