Common BB CLI abstraction (draft proposal)

Owned by Benjamin Balder Bach
Oct 01, 2023
2 min read

This draft was presented to the TC at a meeting for inspirational input.

(original text copied from a Google Presentation)

A CLI - command line interface

  • setup and verification of local environment

  • building containers

  • running/deploying container environment

  • unified parameters for ALL building blocks

  • unified parameters for ALL implementations a specific building block

  • A CLI is an API. It’s an abstraction layer and a contract of how to interface with an application layer.

  • Abstraction layer

    • Local development vs. deployment

    • Technological stack (terraform/docker-compose etc)

  • Packaging

  • Large-scale test “readiness”

  • Quicker bootstrapping for everyone

  • Ability for TAC to standardize when needed

 

bb-util <bb-dir> <command> <arguments...> [options...]

  • bb-util <bb-dir> setup - Sets up local environment, docker containers

  • bb-util <bb-dir> build - Builds the building block 

  • bb-util <bb-dir> run - Runs the service locally

  • bb-dir: Directory containing an implementation readable to bb-util

bb-util is an interface, it is implemented by each building block!

This could be for

  • Core modules (E.g. Consent BB)

  • Test setup

  • Demo setup

 

# All deployments must supply a ./bb-util script accepting a variation of the
# following parameters. A deployment may add arguments and parameters, but should
# document these. If a BB specifies its own set of parameters and arguments, they
# should be UNIVERSAL to all deployments.
#
# ./bb-util <command> <arguments...> [options...]

  • Level 1: GovStack Building Block-level specification, an interface that’s universal to all building blocks. Could for instance be about basic commands: setup, build, run, test, version + universal options “--verbose” etc.

  • Level 2: Building Block specification: All commands, arguments and options specified for all implementations to follow. This could be for instance if Consent BB wishes to have a flag “--allow-superuser-role”

 

# Currently, the repo structure specifies to have "/examples" as a layout of
# implementations of the BB and its API spec
# We could propose to rename it /deploy or similar
cd ./examples

# We get bb-util from somewhere
package-manage install bb-util

# We use the general Building Block util to launch an implementation that lives
# in /examples/demo-app/
bb-util ./demo-app run

# Our abstract layout in ./examples contains definitions for bb-util to
# understand the set of commands, arguments and options
# Running show-args reads and outputs these definitions.
bb-util . show-args