The Epinio single developer journey

Introduction

The Quickstart gets you started, but, as a developer, you'll want to see end-to-end workflow solutions for Epinio. That's the aim of these "Epinio journeys", where you'll be able to follow different use cases.

In this tutorial, you focus on the workflow for a solo developer. An example takes you from a bare Kubernetes deployment to a first application deployment.

note

This tutorial describes a process for an individual developer, working on a local machine. The Epinio team plans a future tutorial discussing team working processes.

Prerequisites

Before you can use Epinio, you need a working Kubernetes cluster.

As an individual developer, you might be using a local Kubernetes cluster such as Rancher Desktop or k3d.

note

There are common installation scenarios examples in the installation documents.

This tutorial uses Rancher Desktop as a local Kubernetes cluster.

If you don't have a Kubernetes installation you can install the latest version of Rancher Desktop for your operating system to get started.

More tools

You should install two useful tools in your system:

• kubectl for communicating with the Kubernetes cluster

• helm for deploying Epinio Helm Charts

Depending on the local Kubernetes cluster you installed, these two binaries might be already installed. For example, they're installed as part of Rancher Desktop.

You use these two binaries for Installation only. The development workflow only uses the Epinio CLI.

Installation

Once you have your local Kubernetes cluster installed and running, you can install Epinio.

These are the steps for Rancher Desktop:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.4/cert-manager.yaml

# Wait for cert-manager to stabilize. This should take approximately
# 30 seconds depending on your Internet connection.

helm repo add epinio https://epinio.github.io/helm-charts

helm repo update

helm install epinio -n epinio --create-namespace epinio/epinio --set global.domain=127.0.0.1.sslip.io

tip

You can find the password needed for the login at the end of the installation output.

Command line interface

To use a CLI with your Epinio installation, download the Epinio CLI binary. The binary is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Login

The first task to perform after Epinio installation, is to log in with the binary you downloaded:

epinio login -u admin 'https://epinio.127.0.0.1.sslip.io'

# Trust the certificate by pressing 'y' and 'enter'

tip

If your local Kubernetes cluster restarts, you need to log in again with the command epinio login. Epinio stays installed and the certificates are still valid.

You can confirm that you're logged in by checking the Epinio settings:

epinio settings show

You can also open the Epinio URL, https://epinio.127.0.0.1.sslip.io, in your browser and use the web UI.

Deploy your application with Epinio

Now that you have completed the installation and setup tasks, you can use Epinio to deploy your application.

Epinio uses Paketo buildpacks to create a container image for your application. Then Epinio uses the image to create a container with your application container image, which runs on your Kubernetes cluster. You can find more information about this in the detailed push process documentation.

Epinio also creates a new ingress route, which you use to access your application when it's deployed.

Epinio handles the whole process, which enables you to concentrate on your application rather than its deployment details.

As an example, this deploys a simple application:

# Example code: https://github.com/epinio/example-12factor

# Move to the source code directory.
cd /github/example-12factor

# Deploy your application
epinio push -n mysimpleapp

At the end of the deployment output, you get the URL to use for your application:

Deploying application ...
..............
🕞  Creating application resources
✔️  App is online.
Name: mysimpleapp
Namespace: workspace
Builder Image:
Routes:
1: https://mysimpleapp.127.0.0.1.sslip.io

List the applications deployed

If you're working on many applications, it's useful to see their last deployment times and which URLs you use to access them.

You can get the application's information with the following two commands:

# List all deployed applications
epinio app list

# Display the applications information
epinio app show mysimpleapp

View installation logs

For errors, you can check your staging logs.

You can access the installation logs by running the command:

epinio app logs --staging mysimpleapp

View application logs

You can access the application logs. You might want to have real-time logs displayed to aid problem solving.

Epinio can display the logs either statically or dynamically as follows:

# Display logs statically
epinio app logs mysimpleapp

# Display logs dynamically
epinio app logs --follow mysimpleapp

Create a new port-forward

As mentioned, Epinio creates a new ingress route for your application. Epinio binds the route to port 443 by default.

However, you might need to test parts of your application using different ports. For these cases, run the following command, for example:

epinio app port-forward mysimpleapp 8080:8080

You have three options for specifying ports when creating a port-forward:

• 8080 use the same port number for both local and remote (the same as 8080:8080)
• 3456:8080 use specific ports
• :8080 use a random port as the local port (the same as <random>:8080)

In this example, the epinio command assigns 37677 as the random local port.

$ epinio app port-forward sample :8080

🚢  Executing port forwarding
Namespace: workspace
Application: sample

Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:37677 -> 8080
Forwarding from [::1]:37677 -> 8080
Handling connection for 37677

For more information, see the port forwarding page.

Scale your application

You can add (and remove) instances of your application. To use Epinio scaling use the following command:

epinio app update mysimpleapp --instances 3

After you scale your application, up or down, you can check the status with the command:

epinio app show mysimpleapp

Remove your application

Once your application is no longer needed on your Kubernetes cluster, to free resources, you can uninstall it as follows:

# Delete the application
epinio app delete mysimpleapp

# List the applications to verify mysimpleapp has been deleted
epinio app list