Alfred

Alfred is a development environment manager based on docker-compose, which wants to make it easy to bootstrap local environments with one command.

The idea behind Alfred is to have:

1. A location (repository) for docker-compose files. This can be either on git, or a local file-system.
2. A CLI (Alfred) that given a config file: alfred.yaml, can understand your project dependencies, and spin up the right services using the repository docker-compose files, all in the same network.

For example, let's say you are starting a FastAPI Project in Python, and you need a MongoDB and Redis, you run: alfred init and provide the necessary info for your project, e.g. that you need mongo.

The following gets generated:

/my-project-dir/alfred.yaml

project:
  name: hello-world
  compose: ./docker-compose.yaml

dependencies_root: /Users/Iacopo/GolandProjects/Alfred/examples/simple/systems
dependencies:
  - mongo

network:
  name: alfred-dev

Then you can run it by executing: alfred run /my-project-dir

Alfred will:

1. Collect and cache all your dependencies docker-compose files from either git or the file-system.
2. Override the compose files to ensure services are in the same network and can communicate.
3. Execute your dependencies and project compose.

Why?

The reason behind Alfred is to provide some sort of layer to retrieve docker-compose files for backend systems from repositories/registries, to ensure the developer can get up to speed with a project without having to create a new compose for each project.

Alfred also makes it possible to have a centralized repository where all docker-compose files can be stored and shared with a team of developers, so versions can be kept consistent for simple development environments.

Get Started

1. Place alfred executable in your PATH

To create a new project using a git repo, run:

alfred init --project-root --project-name --dependencies-location https://github.com/repository.git --dependencies-repo-type git --dependencies mongo,kafka

Or, you can also point to a file system location where your docker-compose files live:

alfred init --project-root --project-name --dependencies-location /my/compose/files/root --dependencies-repo-type local --dependencies mongo,kafka