noop Quick Start Guide

What is noop?

noop is an application platform for you to build, run, and live with your apps. You write code and provide noop with a description of your application via a configuration file or files (called noopfiles), and noop takes care of the rest.

A noopfile is a configuration file that lives in your code's repository. It describes the structure of your application in terms of a collection of components (which you can think of as running code), resources (which you can think of as backend services like databases), and the relationships between them. Each version of your application will result in a deployment of a new version of each component when it is deployed, but the resources will stick around.

This guide will help you to get started using noop by deploying a sample application, so you can quickly gain a better understanding of how components, resources, and a noopfile all work together.

Let's get started!

The sample application

The sample application is a simple single page web app to manage food samples that are handed out at a grocery store. The code and noopfiles for it live in this repository, and it's written using nodejs and Vue.js. It is comprised of:

1. A DynamoDB resource to store to-do list items
2. A function component to list the samples currently being served
3. A function component to add a new food sample to be served
4. A function component to stop serving a food sample
5. A service component that returns a web page that allows a user to view and manage the samples being handed out

A function component executes some code statelessly in a container. Every time a function component is called (like via a web request), a new container is created. After the function call is completed, the container is destroyed.

A service component also executes some code statelessly in a container. The difference between service and function components is that service containers are more long-lived. A single service container can handle multiple calls over the course of its lifetime.

Resources have an indefinite lifespan. They are created in noop through the noop console, or are automatically generated by the noop CLI locally. Databases are the most obvious example of a resource, but it also includes other long-lived things like queues, caches, object stores, etc.

Getting Started

First, you'll need to fork this repository in GitHub. Open up https://github.com/rearc/noop-quickstart in a browser, click the Fork button in the upper right, and fork the repository into your account. Once you've forked the repo, you'll need to clone your fork to your local machine. If you haven't already, open up a terminal and enter:

git clone [email protected]:MYACCOUNT/noop-quickstart.git
cd noop-quickstart

Make sure to replace MYACCOUNT with whatever your account name is in GitHub. Once cloned, you'll notice that the sample app is organized into directories in the root of the repository:

noop-quickstart
├ list-samples
│  ├ Noopfile
│  ├ package.json
│  └ index.js
├ add-sample
│  ├ Noopfile
│  ├ package.json
│  └ index.js
├ remove-sample
│  ├ Noopfile
│  ├ package.json
│  └ index.js
└ ui
   ├ Noopfile
   ├ package.json
   ├ server.js
   └ (a bunch of other stuff)

Each directory corresponds to a component, and contains a Noopfile that describes the component. The rest of the contents of the directories is regular old nodejs stuff. Note that noop is agnostic with respect to the layout of your repository - you can use whatever directory structure you want. Let's look at the noopfile for the list-samples component:

COMPONENT list-samples
ROUTE -m GET /api/samples
RESOURCE samples dynamodb -p hashKeyName=id -p hashKeyType=S
ENV SAMPLES_TABLE $.resources.samples.tableName
ENV SAMPLES_ENDPOINT $.resources.samples.endpoint
FROM rearc/noop-nodejs-function:v6.11
COPY package.json package.json
RUN npm install
COPY *.js /function/
FUNCTION ["/function/index.js", "handler"]

You may notice that the noopfile format looks very similar to a Dockerfile. In fact, the noopfile grammar is an extension of the Dockerfile grammar.

The COMPONENT directive tells noop what the name of the component is. It also acts kind of like a header, in that everything between it and FUNCTION or SERVICE later in the noopfile describes the component.

The ROUTE directive tells noop how web requests should be routed to the component. In this case, it routes all HTTP GET requests for /api/samples to this component.

The RESOURCE directive tells noop that this component depends on a DynamoDB resource named samples. If the samples resource is not available or does not meet the requirements of this directive (in this case, the only requirement being that it be DynamoDB), then the component cannot be deployed. The -p hashKeyName=id -p hashKeyType=S indicates that the DyanmoDB has a hash key named id of type string.

The ENV directive works just like it does in a vanilla Dockerfile, except that the value can be a JSON path to a property from a part of your application's definition. DynamoDB resources have a tableName property that is the name of the DynamoDB table of the resource, so $.resources.samples.tableName means "the tableName property of the samples resource." DynamoDB resources also have an endpoint property that is the location to connect to to reach DynamoDB, so $.resources.samples.endpoint means "the endpoint property of the samples resource." Both of these are only needed so they can be passed to the AWS DynamoDB Document Client, as seen in list-samples/index.js on line 16.

The FROM directive is a vanilla Dockerfile FROM. However, in this specific example, the image being used is a helper image written and maintained by Rearc to allow users to quickly write nodejs function components by just exporting a handler function. Note that noop can run any container that binds to port 80, the nodejs function helper image just removes some boilerplate code that would otherwise be needed to run a web server (e.g. Express.js).

The FUNCTION directive tells noop that this component is a function component. The arguments to the FUNCTION directive tell the nodejs function helper image how to run the function inside the context of the container. In this case, the first argument is the path to the nodejs file that contains the function code, and the second argument is the name of the property exported by the file that has the function code (check out exports.handler on line 32 of list-samples/index.js).

All the other directives are vanilla Dockerfile directives.

You might want to take a moment to examine the contents of all of these directories.

Testing locally

To test the sample application locally, you'll first need to install the noop CLI. You can do so in the terminal you opened earlier, using the following, if you already have node, npm, and docker installed:

npm install -g @rearc/noop-cli

This will install the noop CLI globally, so it will be available from anywhere on your system. Let's try running the application locally. Presuming you're still in the noop-quickstart directory, use:

noop run

The noop CLI will then read through the contents of the application repository. It will discover and read all of the noopfiles in the subdirectories, and run containers locally for each component using docker to emulate the behavior in the noop environment so that you can test stuff. Since some of the components have a resource requirement for a DynamoDB named samples, the CLI will also run a separate container with a local work-alike version of DynamoDB for testing.

Now that the application is running locally, open up a web browser and point it at https://localnoop.app:1234. Since the ui component is routed to by HTTP GETs to * (as you can see from the ROUTE directive in its noopfile), this will return the result of calling the ui component. After you've played with the sample application a little bit (hopefully not for too long, since it's not very interesting), open up ui/src/components/sample-list.vue in a text editor.

Change the Samples currently being served on line 3 to Hello, noop!, and save your changes. If the noop CLI is still running, it should automatically detect the change to the ui component, rebuild it, and replace the running container with the newly-built version. If you refresh your web browser, you should see your changes.

Deploying into noop

Now that you've had a taste of how developing locally works in noop, let's try deploying your application into noop.

First, you'll need to open up the noop console in a web browser. It's available at https://alpha.noop.app. Currently, the only mechanism available for logging into the console is via a GitHub federated identity, so click the Login with Github button to create a noop account. If you are not already logged into GitHub in your browser session, you'll be prompted to do so. Once you have, you'll be prompted to allow noop read access to your Github identity if you haven't already.

Once you've jumped through these hoops, you should see the noop console. The first thing you'll need to do is import the forked repository into your personal space in noop. Click Personal Space on the right side of the console home page. This is a special space that belongs solely to you.

Click Repos. Here you can see a list of the repositories you've added to your personal space. To add the forked repository, click New Repo, and enter your GitHub user name in the Owner/Organization Name field, and the repository name (which will be noop-quickstart if you haven't changed it) into the Project Name field. Then, click Submit. You should see the repository added to your list of repositories.

Next, you'll need to create a new application from the repository you've just added. Click Applications. This is a list of the applications you've created in your personal space. Click New App to create a new application. Enter a name for your application in the Application Name field, choose the repository that you just added from the Source Code Repo drop down, and provide a description in the Description field. Then, click Submit. You should now see the application in the list of applications in your personal space.

Next, you'll need to create an environment for the application. An environment is a stand-alone running instance of the entire application, and you can have multiple environments for the same application (for example, dev and prod). Click the application you just created. You should see a list of environments for the application. Click New Environment to create a new environment for your application. You'll need to provide a name in the Environment Name field before clicking the Submit button. You should see a summary of the state of the environment you just created.

Next, you'll want to create the samples DynamoDB resource. Click Resources. You should see a list of the resource for this environment. Click New Resource to see a list of the available resource types you can create. Click DynamoDB Database, and enter samples in the Resource Name field, and id in the Hash Key Name, and select String from the Hash Key Type drop down. Click Create, and a DynamoDB resource will be created for the environment.

Now, let's build and deploy the application. Click Builds from the page for your environment. This page will show you all the builds for this application. In order to build a new version of the application, you'll need to provide a git ref in the git ref field to build the application. Enter master in the git ref field and click Start Build. You should see an entry for the build you just created in the pending state. As the build progresses, this state will change. Wait for the state to become complete, and then let's deploy the sample application.

Click Stage Build for the build you just created. You should see the Change Status of the environment change, and a Deploy Changes button should become available. Click Deploy Changes to trigger a deployment. This will take a little while, so while we wait for that to finish, let's associate an endpoint with the environment, otherwise the environment would not be accessible once deployed.

Click Endpoints. Here you will see a list of endpoints associated with the environment. Click New Endpoint to add one. Choose alpha.noop.app from the domain drop down, and enter the subdomain of alpha.noop.app you would like to use to access the environment. Click Submit, and you should see the endpoint you just created added to the list of endpoints for the envionment.

Click the Summary page. When you application has been deployed, it will say that it is currently running the version of the build you deployed. To test its successful deployment, open https://SUBDOMAIN.alpha.noop.app in a web browser, where SUBDOMAIN is the subdomain you chose, to access your application.

Once your application is running, you can access the logs for each component by clicking Components for the environment and clicking the View Logs icon for the component.

Go forth, dear nooper, and build!

At this point, you're ready to do some exploring on your own. Please take some time to try to build and deploy an application that you actually care about. If you run into any issues, or have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us on the Slack channel. If you want to learn more about the features that noop offers, please check out the noop wiki.