Causa CLI

This is the repository for the Causa CLI, cs. Causa provides, amongst others, development tools for mono-repositories ("workspaces"), meant to be used to manage several projects and their corresponding infrastructure. It uses a plugin system such that cs features can be tailored to each workspace's needs, depending on the programming languages and other technologies used.

Examples of features provided by Causa include:

• Building and pushing artefacts for projects (containers, serverless functions, etc).
• Managing and deploying the infrastructure for such project, in several environments.
• Managing evens and their topics in event-driven systems.

This document provides an overview of how to set up a Causa workspace and the CLI, as well as the core functionalities exposed by the CLI. This is not an exhaustive list, as other Causa modules provide additional language-specific and project type-specific features.

➕ Requirements

The Causa CLI requires Node.js and npm (which comes bundled with Node.js). We recommend installing Node.js using a version manager, such as asdf and its nodejs plugin.

🎉 Installation

Once Node.js and npm have been installed, the Causa CLI can be installed by running:

npm install -g @causa/cli

This will install the Causa CLI globally, and ensure the cs command is accessible in the PATH. However, note that Causa modules for each workspace are installed within the workspace and not globally. This makes each Causa workspace completely independent from one another.

The global installation of the CLI can be updated by running:

npm update -g @causa/cli

🔧 Configuration

Base configuration

A Causa workspace is defined by a Causa configuration file at its root, containing at least the name of the workspace. Usually, it is in this same file that global configuration is defined, such as the dependencies on specific Causa modules:

version: 1

workspace:
  name: my-workspace

causa:
  modules:
    '@causa/workspace-core': '>= 0.18.0 < 1.0.0'

Causa configuration files should be named causa.yaml and can optionally contain a dot-separated suffix, e.g. causa.environments.yaml. While several configuration files can coexist (they will be merged), a single one should define the workspace.name.

Module dependencies are expressed similarly to package.json dependencies and use semantic versioning.

Running the cs CLI in the workspace directory will create a .causa folder containing the installed Causa modules.

Projects hierarchy

A workspace can contain one or several projects. The root of each project should contain a Causa configuration file which, similarly to the workspace, defines the project's name:

project:
  name: my-project
  description: |-
    A project defining a business service written in TypeScript.
    It should be deployed as a container.
  language: typescript
  type: serviceContainer

A project could very well be defined at the workspace's root if it is the only project in it. However, it is more common to put projects in sub-folders, such as:

causa.yaml       # Defines `workspace.name`.
causa.other.yaml # Defines additional configuration at the workspace-level.

project-a/
↳ causa.yaml     # Defines `project.name: project-a`.

project-b/
↳ causa.yaml     # Defines `project.name: project-b`.
↳ causa.2.yaml   # Defines other project-specific configuration.

There is no limit to folder nesting. For example, projects could be grouped by team or domain, depending on the organization's hierarchy.

When running the cs command, the configuration used to perform operations is read from the current folder:

cs               # Running from the root of the workspace.
cs -w project-a/ # Running a command on project A.
cd project-a
cs               # Also running a command on project A.

Configuration inheritance

The configuration values defined in the Causa files are inherited by configurations in sub-folders. Configuration files at the root of the workspace apply to all projects. Configurations files within a single project only apply to this project, and overwrite workspace-values as needed.

However note that:

• Configuration objects are merged, not replaced. If there are conflicting keys in the objects to merge, the value from the most nested configuration is kept (i.e. the one in the project).
• Configuration arrays are concatenated, not replaced.

Environment configuration

There is a final degree of freedom when defining configurations: environments. In this context, environment is meant as "deployment environment", such as staging and production. Environment-specific configuration can be defined in any Causa file:

environments:
  staging: # The ID of the environment, used in `cs` commands.
    name: Staging # A displayable name.
    configuration:
      myConf: some value # Will only be loaded when setting the environment to `staging`.

When running a cs command, the environment can be specified with the -e argument:

cs -w project-a/ -e staging

This will first load the entire configuration for project A (including the workspace configuration). Then, it will merge the staging-specific configuration in it. The content of the environment configuration may have been defined at the workspace level, at the project level, or both.

✨ Features

The features presented here are mainly provided by the @causa/workspace-core module. This module should be referenced in the Causa configuration. Depending on the technology stack used by an organization, it will probably be necessary to depend on other modules. These modules will provide tech stack-specific implementations of base features presented here, as well as additional functionalities.

Project development

The entrypoint of the cs command for many developers will be the day-to-day operations, such as cs build.

cs build

This command builds the artefact for the current project. This could be a ZIP archive for serverless functions, a Docker image for a containerized service, etc. While this operation may compile code if necessary, it does more by outputting an artefact ready to be pushed to some kind of registry.

Implementation is always language and/or project type-specific, so the corresponding Causa module should be depended upon.

cs publish

This commands builds the artefact for the current project, and pushes it to the configured registry. For example, this could upload a serverless functions archive to a remote storage, push a Docker image, publish an npm/python package, etc.

While this command combines cs build and a push step, the "push" implementation is often language and/or project type-specific, so the corresponding Causa module should be depended upon. An exception to this is pushing Docker images for serviceContainer projects, which is supported by the core module.

cs events generateCode

This commands generates interfaces for the events consumed and produced by a project.

Listing events consumed and produced by a project is implemented by the core module for common project types, such as serviceContainer and serverlessFunctions. Some project types may require an additional module to be supported.

Generating interfaces is language-specific and will require the corresponding module.

Local tools

In addition to project development commands, developers will need to test their code locally. This section presents additional tools helping this process.

cs emulators

Testing usually requires mocks or in-memory versions of databases and other services. The cs emulators start and cs emulators stop commands manage local emulators of those services.

No emulator is provided by default as they are tech stack-specific. For example, the google module will expose various GCP emulators.

The cs emulators list command returns the list of available emulators, loaded from the Causa modules.

Documentation

One of the goals of Causa configuration files is also to provide metadata that can be used for documentation generation.

cs openapi

If some projects in the repository expose HTTP endpoints, the OpenAPI documentation for those endpoints can be generated using cs openapi generateSpecification.

The implementation of OpenAPI generation is language-specific and will required the corresponding Causa module.

When run from within a project, only the OpenAPI specification for the project will be generated. When run at the workspace level, the OpenAPI documents for all relevant projects will be generated and merged into a single document.

Infrastructure and environments

One of the strengths of a Causa workspace is being able to manage the entire span of a production system. This includes deploying new features and bug fixes to staging environments for testing. This section presents infrastructure-related cs commands.

cs infrastructure

cs infrastructure commands are specific to the infrastructure project.type. A common language for infrastructure projects is terraform, for which support is implemented in the terraform module.

One can run cs infrastructure prepare in order to prepare a deployment of the current infrastructure project. The output of this operation is a plan.

The next step is to run cs infrastructure deploy with the prepared plan as an argument. This will effectively deploy the infrastructure changes.

One can note that although it is possible to call cs infrastructure with the -e (environment) argument, it is not required. Indeed, some infrastructure projects may not have several environments. However, as it is usually the case, the following section provides more details on this use case.

cs environment

cs environment commands also manage infrastructure, but the infrastructure specific to each deployment environment. As presented in the configuration section, several environments can be configured for a workspace. Additionally, a single project can be set as the project defining the infrastructure for environments:

infrastructure:
  environmentProject: path/to/infrastructure/project # Relative to the workspace's root.

When calling cs environment prepare and cs environment deploy, the same operations as the infrastructure commands will be run, but on the "environment project". Also in this case the -e <environment> argument is required.