Spawn is a project scaffolding CLI tool. It is designed to take an opinion on how to build web and mobile application front and backends. It assumes a three-tiered application architecture It relies on a number of open source tools and frameworks to help bootstrap your applications, enforce best practices, and save time!
Elko is a Software Development firm that specializes in product based application and cloud development. We strive to build the best products for our customers, and for the best price! We are always looking for ways to make our processes more efficient, particularly from an engineering perspective. One thing our engineers noticed was that we spent the same amount of time at the start of each project doing the same things. Creating our initial front end and back end repositories, standing up CI pipelines, deployment platforms, integrating with user management services like Firebase, creating our initial Web/Mobile integrations with our GraphQL apis, etc. We realized that we could save time (and thus save our clients money!) if we began to automate these processes. We can also ensure consistency across our projects, enforce best practices, and gain additional development speed through these efficiencies. And thus Spawn was born!
- Heroku
- Gitlab
- Gitlab CI
Spawn relies on tokens from the various supported platforms to create resources on your behalf. The following documentation can help to get setup on the supported platforms
- React
- NodeJs
The supported languages are based off of a set of curated template applications. They have been designed and built for the purpose of the Elko.
Spawn is an interactive CLI application. Spawn will guide you through the process of selecting what type of application you want to build, the platforms that will host it, and any additional configuration required.
In order to "spawn" an app, simply use the application command and let spawn walk you through the setup process:
./spawn applicationLet's walk through an example. We will create a React application, hosted in Heroku, versioned in Gitlab, and leveraging Gitlab CI for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.
The above gif shows the configuration required to create our apps.
Spawn breaks up the application process into the following sections
| Parameter | Values | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Application Type | Web / Mobile | Type of application to create. Currently supported options are React and NodeJS |
| Project Name | string | Name of project to generate. Currently only support lowercase string values |
| Backend Language | NodeJs | Name of project to generate. Currently only support lowercase string values |
| Client Langauge | React / Native | Token for Spawn to use to create required Heroku deployments |
| Parameter | Values | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Heroku Access Token | string | Name of Heroku team to create Heroku deployments into |
| Heroku Team Name | string | Name of Heroku team to create Heroku deployments into |
| Parameter | Values | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Gitlab Access token | string | Token for Spawn to use to create Gitlab repository |
| Gitlab Group Id | string | Id of Gitlab Group to create repository in, if left blank will create in your account |
Now let's take a look at what was created. Our application was uploaded to Gitlab with our project specific configuration, including the required deployment configuration
And our app was deployed successfully to Heroku. Note - Spawn currently supports dev, stage, and production environments
Spawn uses Github Release to version and manage releases. In order to download the latest release, simply check which version you want to install in spawn's releases section and find which OS version you need. Spawn is copiled for darwin-386, darwin-amd64, linux-386, linux-amd64, windows-386, and windows-amd64.
Once you find the correct version you can download the version of spawn you need, either by manually clicking the download link or programmatically. Here is a one liner using wget:
wget https://github.com/elko-dev/spawn/releases/download/<VERSION>/<SPAWN_OS_NAME> -O spawnexample:
wget https://github.com/elko-dev/spawn/releases/download/v0.5.0/spawn-darwin-386 -O spawnfinally, make spawn executable:
chmod +x spawn