Watt-Extra

Watt-Extra is an enterprise-ready runtime manager for Platformatic applications that provides production-grade capabilities including monitoring, compliance checking, caching, authentication, and integration with Infrastructure Control Center (ICC) services.

Overview

Watt-Extra wraps existing Platformatic applications (Service, Composer, Node, or Next.js) to enhance them with enterprise features without requiring any code changes. It acts as a transparent layer that:

• Monitors application performance and health metrics
• Enforces compliance policies and security rules
• Manages HTTP caching strategies based on ICC configuration
• Handles authentication and authorization flows
• Schedules cron jobs and periodic tasks
• Reports metadata and telemetry to control plane services

The runtime manager dynamically patches Platformatic configurations at startup to inject these capabilities while maintaining full compatibility with your existing applications.

Environment Variables

Required

None.

Optional

• PLT_ICC_URL - Infrastructure Control Center URL for connecting to control plane services. When not set, Watt-Extra runs in standalone mode without ICC integration
• PLT_APP_NAME - Unique identifier for your application instance. Optional when PLT_ICC_URL is set - if not provided, it will be automatically determined from Kubernetes labels following these rules:
  1. Uses app.kubernetes.io/instance label first
  2. Falls back to ReplicaSet naming convention ({app-name}-{hash})
• PLT_APP_DIR - Application directory (defaults to current working directory)
• PLT_TEST_TOKEN - JWT token for authentication in non-Kubernetes environments
• PLT_LOG_LEVEL - Logging level for the application
• PLT_CACHE_CONFIG - HTTP caching configuration

Standalone Mode

Watt-Extra can run without connecting to an Infrastructure Control Center (ICC). When PLT_ICC_URL is not set:

• No ICC connection attempts are made
• All ICC-dependent plugins (alerts, compliance, metadata, scheduler) skip their operations
• The application runs with local configuration only

Installation

npm install @platformatic/watt-extra

Usage

Add a script to your package.json:

"scripts": {
  "watt-extra": "watt-extra start"
}

Then run:

npm run watt-extra

Command Line Interface

Watt-Extra provides a command-line interface:

# Show help
watt-extra --help

# Start the runtime manager
watt-extra start

# Set log level
watt-extra start --log-level=debug

# Set ICC URL
watt-extra start --icc-url=http://icc-server:3000

# Set application name
watt-extra start --app-name=my-application

# Set application directory. This is useful for development and test
watt-extra start --app-dir=/path/to/application