fireup

In the world of microservices to test locally our application, we often need to start multiple processes, each with its own options and environment. Using fireup we can do this with a single command and watch the output in a single console, just like a monolith application.

Inspired by Foreman, node-foreman and Cloud Foundry manifest.yml.

What's in:

• Launch multiple processes with a single command
• Aggregate output of all processes in the same console
• All configuration in one yaml file (think of Procfile and .env combined)
• Multi-line environment variables
• For each process specify
  • Shell command to start
  • Environment variables
  • Working directory
• Common env vars for all processes
• Tested on
  • Linux
  • Windows

What's out:

• Scaling (multiple instances of one process type)
• Monitoring and auto restart
• Load balancing and proxying
• Export to other process managers
• Port assignment

Install

Install Node.js unless you have it already.

$ [sudo] npm install -g fireup

Example

fireup.yml

processes:
  proxy:
    cmd: node proxy.js
    env:
      PORT: 8080
      FORWARD: >
        {
          "target": "http://localhost:8181",
          "tomeout": 15000
        }

  app:
    cmd: node start.js
    env:
      PORT: 8181

$ fireup

Note: the pid displayed is actually the id of the shell process which in turn starts the respective process as a child.

The process tree looks like this:

• fireup
  • shell 1
    • process 1
  • shell 2
    • process 2

Reference

Command line

fireup [<fireup.yml>]

Start the processes defined in the given yaml file. By default loads fireup.yml from current directory.

fireup.yml

processes

An object inside which each property describes a processes to start. The property name is the process name. The value can be a shell command to start the respective process. Alternatively it can be an object specifying additional process properties.

processes:
  app: node start.js

cmd

Shell command to start the process Mandatory

env

Additional environment variables for this process. Parent environment is inherited by the process. Can be used also at root level of fireup.yml to define common environment variables for all processes.

dir

Process current working directory. By default the directory of fireup.yml (base directory). If dir is relative, it is resolved from the base directory.

History

See release history in GitHub. There are breaking changes since version 1.

Credits

Graffiti font used in the banner is designed by Leigh Purdie.

I borrowed some insights from node-foreman.

And of course all the open source projects used here.

License

MIT