lennybr / local-dev-env-blog-example

Local Microservice Development Environment Example

By Mac Watrous [email protected]

This repository is intended as a companion piece for the following blog: https://doordash.engineering/2023/03/07/how-to-speed-up-local-development-of-a-docker-application-running-on-aws/

Prerequisites

To run the example backend microservice in this repository you will need the following:

• Node version >= 16.13 but <17 installed.
  • https://nodejs.org/en/download/
• Docker Desktop installed and running.
  • https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop/
• postgresql installed.
  • brew install postgresql
• awslocal installed.
  • https://docs.localstack.cloud/integrations/aws-cli/#localstack-aws-cli-awslocal

Running

First run the following commands:

npm install

Then to start the local development environment run:

docker-compose up

To spin down the local development environment you can just quit the docker-compose process by using ctrl-c.

Making Changes

While the docker-compose environment is up the Node service will hotswap every time there is a change in the src directory. If you make changes outside of this directory that would affect the microservice application, such as installing a new npm package, etc. you will need to rebuild the backend microservice application for this change to reflect.

docker-compose build api

If you modify anything related to the database or the Terraform for the Localstack configuration, you will need to restart the docker-compose environment for these changes to take effect (aka there is no hotswapping for anything outside of the Node application). This can be down by quitting the docker-compose process (if its running) via ctrl-c and then starting it back up with docker-compose up.

Example Requests

Add a new note

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"contents":"This is my test note!"}' "http://127.0.0.1:8080/notes"

Get a note by id

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" "http://127.0.0.1:8080/notes/<id>"

License

This library is released under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE for details.