Alfred

Is your favorite butler, who's able to run and monitor jobs to be executed on virtual machines in the cloud.

Dependencies

• bash
• docker
• ssh
• tar
• zstd

Setup

1. Install the required dependencies.
2. Download Alfred's client binary and put it in your $PATH.
3. Your SSH key must be added to Alfred remote server by an administrator. Ask @gnutix.
4. Add the Alfred host key to your known_hosts: ssh-keyscan -H alfred.tipee.dev >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts
5. You should now be able to run alfred version and see the version of the remote server.

Usage

Run alfred --help to see the list of available commands and options.

Setup dev environment

Required tools

• make
• Go 1.21+
• Reflex
  • go install github.com/cespare/reflex@latest
• Protocol Buffer (needed for gRPC)
  • Download the protoc compiler archive, unpack it
  • Move the bin/protoc file to /usr/local/bin/protoc
  • Move the include/google folder to /usr/local/include/google
  • Install Go plugins :
    • go install google.golang.org/protobuf/cmd/protoc-gen-go@latest
    • go install google.golang.org/grpc/cmd/protoc-gen-go-grpc@latest
  • If not done already, add $(go env GOPATH)/bin to your $PATH

Run alfred server in local

Commands

Run the server:

make bin/alfred-server
bin/alfred-server [options...]

Run the server (with auto-reload):

make run-server

Remote configuration

By default, the alfred client will connect to the production server.

For development, you can override the default remote by setting the ALFRED_REMOTE="localhost:25373" environment variable to point to your local server. You can also pass the --remote localhost:25373 to alfred's commands each time.

OpenStack credentials

To run alfred server with the OpenStack provisioner, you need credentials to access the OpenStack API. Ask @BastienClement.

Project maintenance

Releasing the client binary

Releasing a new version of the client binary is done by creating a release on GitHub. The binaries are automatically created for different platforms by a GitHub Action.

Deploying the server binary

Deployment is done manually using a GitHub Action. Beware that running jobs are stopped during the deployment.

Updating Alfred nodes' image

The Alfred nodes' image is maintained using Packer in a separate repository. Ask @BastienClement, he's the only one who can do it for now...