@app.json/cloudformation v0.0.10

@app.json/cli

Capture what your app needs to be deployed and run.

Status

This is early, POC-stage code. Lot's more to be still done! But please, get in touch if this looks promising, I'd love to hear about your use-case.

What is app.json?

app.json is a file for storing:

• The environment variables your app needs
• The components (eg. microservices) that make up your app and the environment variables they need
• External dependencies (WIP)

Installation

npm install --save-dev @app.json/cli

Usage

ajx init: create an empty app.json file ajx dotenv: generate a .env file based on an app.json file ajx generate: generate an app.json file based on an CloudFormation template.yaml file ajx ts: generate an config.ts file based on an app.json file

config.ts

One aim of this project is to make sure we're only using environment variables defined in our app.json file. For CloudFormation projects, we also need to make sure these are defined appropriately in template.yaml.

config.ts is a file we generate that allows us to access the environment variables we've defined, as well as accessing all the environment variables for a component, in a type-safe way.

Hence, our proposed workflow is:

1. Add environment variables to template.yaml
2. Generate app.json from template.yaml
3. Generate config.ts from app.json
4. Import the environment variables for a specific component from config.ts

Future direction

This is a POC which is very tightly bound up in my own immediate needs. The aim is to:

1. Add a plugin architecture to the CLI
2. Move all the CloudFormation stuff to a plugin

Inspiration

This is inspired by Heroku's app.json file, but abstracted away from the Heroku specifics. This app.json is intended as a general-purpose file for capturing what an app needs to be deployed and run.