Is there a reason for not allowing access to directories above the Acornfile directory?

[sbmw]

Take the following local directory structure. Where Deployment and Service1 are git projects.

├── Repos
│ ├── ProjectA
│ │ ├── Deployment
│ │ │ ├── Acornfile.local
│ │ ├── Services
│ │ │ ├── Service1
│ │ │ │ ├── src

During local development, we would like to be able to do things like reference projects within the group.

dirs: {
    "/app": "../Services/Service1"
}

or projects elsewhere in the /repo tree

dirs: {
    "/foo": "../../CommonLibProject"
}

or even something like ~/.npmrc

dirs: {
    "/app/someconfigfile.json": "/home/someconfigfile.json"
}

However, each of the above would be disallowed by (I think!) https://github.com/acorn-io/aml/blob/7aded86d1c3ec20d6bfe169880a44a5fc3a049da/schema/v1/app.cue#L168

So, my question: is there a reason for disallowing references outside of the project route or can the regex that validates directory paths be made less strict?

[ibuildthecloud]

This is just a technical issue. The use case make sense. It has to do with the fact that the path of the files reference is technically relative to the build.context field. I'm not sure, but guess this might work if you do build: context: "../..". That will then make the files and the dockerfile build relative to the parent directory. I'm not 100% sure that works, but the technical theory lines up :)

So basically what you would do

containers: foo: {
  build: {
     dockerfile: "Dockerfile"
     context: "../.."
  }
  files: "/foo": "CommonLibProject"
}

Then in your Dockerfile all COPY statements must be relative to ../... If this solution works for you, we can fix any bugs you might hit (again in theory should work, but I think we have weird pathing issues atm).

[sbmw]

Hi, thanks very much for getting back to me. For us at least, setting eg build: context: "../.." would be fine, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to work in my tests. I can close this discussion and raise an issue with a simple reproduction repo if that's the best way forward?

[sbmw]

I think I was wrong on this. Allowing directory sync from any location might be nice, but perhaps isn't the acorn way.

The "access projects elsewhere" example

dirs: {
    "/foo": "../../CommonLibProject"
}

Can instead be handled by nesting that project's own Acornfile:

acorns: {
    "common-service-acorn": {
        build: {
            context: "../../CommonProject"
            acornfile: "../../CommonProject/Acornfile"
        }
        publishMode: "defined"
        profiles: "dev"
    }
}

And, "quick access to user config files during dev"

dirs: {
    "/app/someconfigfile.json": "/home/someconfigfile.json"
}

Should probably be handled with secrets

files: {
    "/home/.npmrc": "secret://npm-config/file"
}

With the first example of being able to have the Acornfile somewhere other than the top-level. That's not so straightforward, but we can easily workwround by symlinking the Acornfile to the top-level with a project init script.

So I'm going to close this as I have all the answers I need. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction.