Rafter 🏡
Update: Rafter is pivoting to a hosted model. This open-source code remains as a fun reference. Enjoy!
Rafter is a serverless deployment platform powered by Google Cloud. It leverages Google Cloud Run (and many other tools) to transform your Git repository into a fully-scalable serverless application running in the cloud - with zero configuration.
Google Cloud Services
Cloud Run (web service)
- Creates services for each environment of each project, automatically
- Cloud Run handles all traffic roll-out, scaling, and configuration
- Environment variables are assigned to each unique service through the API
Cloud Build (image creation)
- Docker images are created when code is pushed to GitHub
- Dockerfile is automatically provided based on type of project
- Currently supported: Laravel, Node.js
Cloud SQL (database)
- Database instances are provisioned by Rafter through the API
- Databases are created and assigned to projects automatically using the Admin API
- Environmental variables are properly assigned based on type of project
Cloud Firestore (cache and session drivers)
UPDATE: This... doesn't work great, due to a number of factors. Looking into alternatives.
- NoSQL database to support key-value caching and session management
- Drivers integrated automatically based on project
- No additional credentials required for consumer apps to use, since credentials are supplied within Cloud Run
Cloud Tasks (queue driver)
- Robust queue management platform
- Queues are automatically created for each environment
- Dedicated Cloud Run service is created for each project to handle incoming jobs through HTTP request payloads
- No daemon or worker instance is required
- Since Cloud Run is serverless, instances can fan out, thousands of jobs can be processed in a matter of seconds
Cloud Storage (image artifacts and uploads)
- Object storage, similar to S3
- Automatically handles uploaded artifacts from Cloud Build
- Integrated into application helpers based on project type to handle user uploads
Cloud Scheduler
- Used for firing cron events in e.g. Laravel
Cloud Logging
- HTTP requests, stdout and app logs displayed inside Rafter log viewer
Roadmap
Here are things I'd like to work on next:
- Extract laravel-rafter-core into a package
- Inject Laravel Stackdriver log driver config
- Support other projects:
- Node
- WordPress
- Rails
- Go
- Custom Dockerfile
- Email driver support (does Google offer this as part of GCP?)
- Integration of Secret Manager
- Integration of commands
- Integration of GCS for better uploads with Laravel
- Better Database operations
- Leverage GitHub Deployment API to mark when a branch has been deployed
- Lots of UI upgrades:
- Log viewer
- Database information
- User profile/settings
- Better Cloud Build optimization
- Clone using ZIP instead of Git
- Use secrets rather than plain text tokens for security
- Consider adding multistage builds for Nodejs, Composer building steps
- Implement Custom Domain assignment and onboarding
- Implement an environment deletion workflow to delete resources/schedulers/etc
- Allow users to clone a public project without having to connect a source provider
- Create a CLI to allow users to push a local project without connecting a source provider
Development notes
- Clone it
- Use Valet to run it and connect to a local MySQL database
- Run
make shareto fire up ngrok.io local tunnel - Requires grpc PHP extension to be installed locally:
pecl install grpc