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Getting Started

Introduction

This guide covers the installation of the CNC framework and the necessary cloud CLI tools. CNC simplifies deploying applications to the cloud by utilizing infrastructure as code principles.

Prerequisites

  • Access to a terminal
  • Python 3.9-3.11 installed on your machine
  • Cloud provider account (AWS aws or Google Cloud gcloud) and authenticated CLI
  • docker
  • terraform
  • jq

Installation Steps

Install CNC

pip install cocnc

Docker

We also offer a docker image with all of this installed, us-docker.pkg.dev/coherence-public/public/cnc:latest. You'll need to handle authenticating the cloud CLI as well as mounting the local docker socket with -v to use it. Better instructions here coming soon!

Install and authenticate cloud CLI:

This would be either the aws or gcloud CLI. Read more at aws or gcp.

For google:

You need to do both of these.

gcloud auth application-default login
gcloud auth login

For AWS:

Choose the appropriate one.

aws configure // aws sso configure

Setup CNC configuration files

cnc.yml

The CNC config is a superset of docker-compose that adds one required key, the type in x-cnc. See the full schema and options here. If you have an existing docker-compose file, you can add the x-cnc options to it and use the same file without renaming by passing the --config-file option to cnc when running commands.

Here's a simple example that will produce one container-running service in your cloud called app using a Dockerfile at the project root.

services:
  app:
    x-cnc:
      type: backend
    build:
      context: .

environments.yml

The environments.yml file defines your environments and their configuration, including environment variables and URLs. You can define many collections, each of which can live in its own cloud account (making it easy to segregate different environment types). Read more about the different options and see a full example here.

This example produces one environment at dev.mydevsite.com running in the GCP project foo-bar-123 using the built-in infra as code and build/deploy scripts in the run-light flavor. Read more about CNC flavors here. 

name: my-first-app
provider: gcp
region: us-east1
flavor: run-lite
version: 1
collections:
- name: dev
  account_id: "foo-bar-123"
  environments:
  - name: dev
    environment_variables:
    - name: FOO
      value: bar
    - name: MY_API_KEY
      # you add this secret directly to your cloud account directly
      secret_id: my-secret-123

If you use Coherence cloud, you don't need to manage the environments.yml file yourself, the SaaS protal will manage it for you.

The run-light flavor will be the cheapest and fastest way to get started with deploying a cnc application: it uses GCP Cloud Run for a serverless and free deployment that fits many common applications.

Deploy your first environment

Provision the infrastructure

If you are using aws sso for your credentials locally, you'll need to set AWS_PROFILE=PROFILE_NAME in your environment.

cnc provision plan

This will show you the terraform plan. You can view the raw terraform that was compliled with:

cnc provision debug

And then you can apply the changes with:

cnc provision apply

This will create the cloud resources for your environment. The terraform state for this infra will be stored in .terraform in your working directory, just as if you'd used terraform directly. You can customize the state location, along with the terraform hcl that is generates, read more here.

You can now run cnc info environments to see information about the configured infrastructure, including the URL of the service.

Now, set the DNS records as required by your base_domain setting. This does not apply to some flavors, e.g. can ignore for run-lite. See flavor docs here for more. Run cnc info app and then:

  • For GCP, copy the Load Balancer IP and set a CNAME in your DNS provider for *.yourbasedomain.com to that IP
  • For AWS, copy the NS records and set on *.yourbasedomain.com in your DNS provider

Sometimes, you'll see errors that a service is not enabled or a quota was not available. If your cloud account is new, in most cases these errors will resolve in a few minutes and you can try again.

Deploy the container

You can customize the scripts that run for build/deploy using a Jinja2 template, read more here.

Build the docker image

This will build the docker image locally and push it to the container registry created automatically.

# dev is the environment name in environment.yml
cnc build perform dev --service-tag app=v1

Subsequent builds will get faster as they re-use the docker cache.

Deploy the docker image

This will render new runtime templates (e.g. Cloud Run/ECS/k8s.yml) and apply them to the right clusters/services.

# dev is the environment name in environment.yml
cnc deploy perform dev --service-tag app=v1

Build & Deploy

There is an update command to make the build/deploy cycle easier. 

# dev is the environment name in environment.yml
cnc update perform dev --service-tag app="$(date +%s)"

For build, update and deploy you can pass --service-tag SERVICE_NAME=TAG and --service SERVICE_NAME. git SHA is a great TAG, the default is latest. If you do not specify any --service, will perform for all services in the config. The -t flag is a shortcut for --service-tag.

Get a shell in the environment

This will start a new container on the local machine, with the right environment variables a VPC proxy setup. It will use gcloud ssh or aws ssm under the hood to reverse proxy into your VPC.

# dev is the environment name in environment.yml
cnc toolbox start dev

You now can run your REPL or anything else you need to do! Read more at toolboxes