Developer Environment

In order to get your application working with Replicated, you’ll want to set up a simple environment to iterate on your Replicated YAML and images. Our Replicated Studio is designed to shorten the cycle between writing and testing YAML and will recommend best practices to help you solve problems quickly.

Install Replicated Studio (with ngrok)

1. Run Replicated Studio on your local dev machine

You’ll need Docker installed on your local development machine.

mkdir -p $HOME/replicated

docker run --name studio -d \
    --restart always \
    -v $HOME/replicated:/replicated \
    -p 8006:8006 \
    replicated/studio:latest

2. Install ngrok

Since we’re developing locally, we’ll need to expose our local development environment to the internet, so that changes you make to current.yaml in your replicated directory can be served to your development server.

Download and install ngrok from the official site (you’ll need to create an account as well.)

When you’re done with that, you can expose your localhost by running ./ngrok http 8006 on the command line. You should see a line that looks something like this:

Forwarding https://a23glmnop.ngrok.io -> 127.0.0.1:8006 Copy that .ngrok.io URL, you’ll need it when you install Replicated on the development server.

3. Install Replicated with Studio configuration on the dev server

Finally, use our simple installation script (on a Linux server in your IaaS provider of choice, or in a local dev environment in Vagrant/VirtualBox) to install Replicated an the native scheduler. You’ll be prompted for the Replicated Studio URL during setup, use the hostname that ngrok provided you (routing to port 8006 on your local machine).

curl -sSL https://get.replicated.com/studio/native | sudo bash

Iterate on your application YAML

During Studio installation on your local development machine, a new directory named replicated is created in your home directory. Once your license is activated, Replicated Studio will set up the most recent release and save it to ~/replicated/current.yaml. Any time this file is updated and saved, Replicated Studio will create a new release using the next available sequence number. To start you’ll probably want to copy and paste your most recent yaml as the downloading process often adds in default null values.

From there you can use your favorite editor locally (like Atom, Visual Studio Code, Vim, or Emacs) and saved changes will trigger new updates available to your development server.

Note: In the directory ~/replicated/releases/ you can view a copy of each release Replicated Studio has created along the way. If you supply an invalid yaml file that isn’t recognized as a valid update in the on-prem UI, you can simply delete the invalid release iteration from the local directory ~/replicated/releases and save a new version of current.yaml.

Applying updates to the dev server

After you have saved your current.yaml changes, you can navigate to your on-prem Admin Console (https://<YOUR SERVER ADDRESS>:8800) and click the Check for updates button to see your new release.

Iterate on your Application Images

As well as being able to iterate on your application YAML, you can also use Studio to iterate on your Docker images. This simplifies the development workflow when you need to make changes to your code base to support on-prem deployments.

To do this, rebuild your Docker images on your Studio server reusing the existing tags. Once you restart the application from the on-prem Admin Console (https://<YOUR SERVER ADDRESS>:8800) or CLI, your updated images will be used by Replicated.

Note: When iterating on Docker images in Studio, referencing local Docker images using the latest tag is not supported. Replicated will re-pull any images with the latest tag, thus overwriting any changes you are making locally.

_Note: Pulling third-party private images is not supported with Replicated studio. If your app uses an external private registry, you’ll need to pull the images down to the server where the on-prem Admin Console is running. _

Additional features

The logs from Replicated Studio display any lint or syntax issues detected in your application yaml. You can also view all interactions the on-prem Replicated has with the Studio API.

You can follow these logs in real time using:

docker logs -f studio