DevX

Ahmed

Ahmed Hesham

Introduction

DevX is a tool for building lightweight Internal Developer Platforms. Use DevX to build internal standards, prevent misconfigurations early, and enable infrastructure self-service.

Installation

Homebrew

brew tap stakpak/stakpak
brew install devx

Download the binary

Docker image

docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/app" ghcr.io/stakpak/devx:latest -h

Quick start

➜ devx project init
➜ devx project update
➜ devx project gen
➜ devx build dev
🏭 Transforming stack for the "dev" environment...
[compose] applied resources to "build/dev/compose/docker-compose.yml"
[terraform] applied resources to "build/dev/terraform/generated.tf.json"

Usage

Configuration language

We use CUE to write strongly typed configurations. You can now shift YAML typos left, instead of detecting errors when applying configurations. You can easily transform CUE configuration files to and from YAML (CUE is a superset of YAML & JSON).
CUE is the result of years of experience writing configuration languages at Google, and seeks to improve the developer experience while avoiding some nasty pitfalls. CUE looks like JSON, while making declarative data definition, generation, and validation a breeze. You can find a primer on CUE here.

Create a stack (by Developers)

You create a stack to define the workload and its dependencies.
package main

import (
"stakpak.dev/devx/v1"
"stakpak.dev/devx/v1/traits"
)

stack: v1.#Stack & {
components: {
cowsay: {
traits.#Workload
containers: default: {
image: "docker/whalesay"
command: ["cowsay"]
args: ["Hello DevX!"]
}
}
}
}

Create your own stack builders or use community packages (by Platform Engineers)

You can customize how the stack is processed by writing declarative transformers.
package main

import (
"stakpak.dev/devx/v2alpha1"
"stakpak.dev/devx/v2alpha1/environments"
)

builders: v2alpha1.#Environments & {
dev: environments.#Compose
}

Validation

Validate configurations while writing
➜ devx project validate
👌 Looks good

Platform capability discovery

➜ devx project discover --transformers
[🏷️ traits] "stakpak.dev/devx/v1/traits"
traits.#Workload a component that runs a container
traits.#Replicable a component that can be horizontally scaled
traits.#Exposable a component that has endpoints that can be exposed
traits.#Postgres a postgres database
traits.#Helm a helm chart using helm repo
traits.#HelmGit a helm chart using git
traits.#HelmOCI a helm chart using oci

[🏭 transformers] "stakpak.dev/devx/v1/transformers/argocd"
argocd.#AddHelmRelease add a helm release (requires trait:Helm)

[🏭 transformers] "stakpak.dev/devx/v1/transformers/compose"
compose.#AddComposeService add a compose service (requires trait:Workload)
compose.#ExposeComposeService expose a compose service ports (requires trait:Exposable)
compose.#AddComposePostgres add a compose service for a postgres database (requires trait:Postgres)

[🏭 transformers] "stakpak.dev/devx/v1/transformers/terraform"
terraform.#AddHelmRelease add a helm release (requires trait:Helm)

Package management

You can publish and share CUE packages directly through git repositories.

Create a new packages

Create a new repository to store your packages (you can host multiple packages per repository).
cue.mod
└── module.cue # module: "domain.com/platform"
subpackage
└── file.cue
file.cue

Add the package to module.cue

module: ""

packages: [
"github.com/<org name>/<repo name>@<git revision>:",
]

For private packages (optional)

export GIT_USERNAME="username"
export GIT_PASSWORD="password"

Update packages (pulling updates will replace existing packages)

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Posted Dec 3, 2023

A tool for generating, validating & sharing all your configurations, powered by CUE. Works with Kubernetes, Terraform, Compose, GitHub actions and much more...…