Spin up your development background processes with ease | Hacker News Reader

Spin up your development background processes with ease

github.com

53 pointsphilo0129 comments

This is cool. I've been looking for something like this to pair with my nix env. Docker makes process management and logging in the dev environment so easy, but between the performance issues and abstraction leaks when jumping back and forth between native containers on linux and virtual machines on macos we gave up and started using nix to handle the reproducibility of our dev environment. The only thing I miss is the ease of process/service/log management. If anyone has any other solutions I would love to hear them.

Thanks! Feel free to submit some feature requests to the GitHub repo and I'll see what I can do to further ease the process of service and log management.

https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/introducing-overmind-and...

Devenv.sh is using these (out of the box)

Btw, there's a large number of tools that use the Procfile file format, including what appears to be the original one, written in Ruby https://github.com/ddollar/foreman (the readme has links to a partial list of foreman clones)

But I agree that overmind is the best of the bunch

Porter is a command-line interface (CLI) tool that makes it easy to run background services by adding a few lines to a configuration file. These services are managed by Supervisord, a process control system that ensures that all processes are kept up and running. With Porter, you don't have to manually start and manage background services in multiple terminal tabs. Instead, you can simply use the porter command to manage all of your services in a single place.

I was excited about this because I use docker-compose to run a service written in Rust. The final command of the container is “cargo watch -x run” and the compiles take 1-2 minutes per hot reload. Porter solved this by completely sidestepping images, but I’m still considering if this is worth having the user install cargo on their host machine (in the case of porter) and give up hermetic development. Not sure yet, but thanks for this tool!

I think it's worth installing software on your OS if your situation allows for it. I mostly use PHP and NodeJS, which are easy to manage with tools like Laravel Valet or nvm. I've been doing this for years and love it. I can imagine that if you have various difficult services to install and maintain on your main OS, using Docker is a more convenient solution.

Does this have any advantages over Docker compose? It does not require Docker, of course, but the reproducibility is going to be much lower.

Also, why would you write a tool like this in PHP?

I don't think it has many advantages over Docker compose besides maybe the auto restart option and I'm working on adding file monitoring as well, so you can set files or directories to monitor and once chances occur the service restarts. I don't use Docker locally myself and wanted to have a solution for making it easier to manage background processes and not having to spin up five shells.

Why I wrote a tool like this in PHP is simple, I love PHP and I'm a big fan of the ecosystem / community.

Really cool, love the idea of managing background services for your dev environment, without having to use Docker Compose.

We’ve been working on a similar workflow with Devbox (https://jetpack.io/devbox), using Nix to install and run dev env services

I've done something similar with Nix and supervisord before. On the one hand, I think this kind of simplified config format can be nice for teams who don't want to have to contend with the process supervisor in all its complexity. On the other, supervisord is pretty simple already.

Good point, I think there are many approaches to solving this problem, and every approach having pros and cons. I'm adding some additional features like auto restart when files are modified but overall I agree that this simplified config format can be nice for teams who don't want to have to contend with the process supervisor in all its complexity.

This looks like a good alternative to Foreman (https://ddollar.github.io/foreman/). Do you know about it? What advantages do you think Porter has over it?

Congratulations on the cool project.

Thanks! After I started building and sharing my progress on Twitter some did suggest foreman. I just took a quick look and I think Porter is a bit easier to use because of the porter.yml file you can add to every project. Which may read a bit easier compared to the procfiles. One or two other advantages could be the interval restart feature, where you can restart services automatically after a certain interval (useful for unstable services). The second advantages is something I'm working on at the moment, where you can define processes to restart if certain files have been modified.

Am I the only one who uses a development Nomad cluster to solve the exact same problem? Not sure what this and other tools suggested in the comments here have over Nomad.

Nomad can schedule anything: random JAR files, scripts, Docker/Podman containers, firecracker VMs, you name it.

What's the advantage of using this over systemd user services?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/User

Again, services are configured with short text-based configuration files.

Good question, I think there are many different approach on solving running multiple services. So it boils down to what you need, and what works for you. One advantage might be the ease of use. Using Porter you don't need to know anything about Supervisor, systemd or other more technical implementations. Porter abstracts away these things so you only have to write a simple .yml file.

> Using Porter you don't need to know anything about Supervisor, systemd [...]

Using systemd you don't need to know anything about Porter.

> One advantage might be the ease of use. [...] Porter abstracts away these things so you only have to write a simple .yml file.

Is the systemd unit file really that much more complex? The example `mpd` service file might take more lines than the equivalent Porter .yml snippet, but the DOS/Windows 3-era ".ini" file format isn't exactly rocket surgery, and there's only one kinda weird bit of boilerplate ("WantedBy=default.target") that isn't immediately obvious why it's there. Other than that, the systemd config for a simple service is, well, simple. (At least, it looks that way to me.)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/User#Example

Yeah, there's a lot of complexity you can add with systemd units, but only if you have complex use-cases that need it. As far as I can tell, the only alternative to "Yeah, there's a config option for that, but it can take a bit of reading to find out its name" is "No, you can't do that, sorry".

As Alan Kay's classic adage goes, "simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible" :-)

I'm excited for this tool. I don't use Docker so something like this is going to make my life much easier. I like the idea of being able to hop between projects and start all the processes I need for that project with one command.

Thanks Aaron! That's great to hear!

the only advantage over docker that I see is that it doesnt require the overlay fs stuff docker has, but the downside of this is that it doesnt keep its own state. It seems to use system state, such as any global configuration, caches, etc.

I prefer docker compose, simply because its fully reproducible, no matter where I am, and sets up all the tools it uses.

This tools looks like it still requires you to install your tooling - that screams like it will break if you have different distros you run this on, with different versions of tools, etc.

Agree, it all depends on your use case. Docker is amazing for projects that require services that are difficult to install, configure and maintain on your main OS.

Porter is ideal for those already running these services on their main OS and just need something to run and manage these services more easily.

I have started using this immediately as I saw the release tweet - solves a real problem for me whenever I am working on a project that doesn't use Docker. Good stuff!

Thanks! That's great to hear!

If you want to take the next step past docker-compose, I strongly recommend Skaffold instead of moving backwards to supervisord.

Good tip! I haven't heard of Skaffold but it looks like an interesting alternative. Skaffold seems to offer a great amount of features but it might be a steep learning curve for beginners. Porter is not meant to be a replacement for docker-compose, it's more focused towards those who don't use Docker and want an easy way to run certain processes.

amazing, I only wish for the VS Code integration

Thanks! You can use the build-in terminal VS Code provides to run any of the Porter commands. What would you like to see in a native VS Code extension?

I was looking for an extension to do the following: when I open a project (and maybe press a status bar button), it runs all the processes I need (from the config in the root of the project) and streams their logs in separate terminals (so I can see those logs immediately); when I close the projects, all of this gets shutdown

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