Tutorial: deploying your first application using plcli

Tutorial: deploying your first application

There are two things that you need to do in order to be able to deploy an application to PlanetLab using plcli:

1. Make sure that there are healthy nodes with all the needed software attached to your slice
2. Add a .plcli.yml file to the root of your public git repository

Adding a .plcli.yml file to your repository

The .plcli.yml must be added to the root of your repository and there are three properties that can be added:

• bootstrap_cmds: list of commands that chained together bootstraps your application
• env: environment variables that will be available to your app once started
• launch_cmds: list of commands that chainged together starts your application

There will also be an additional environment variable by the name PLCLI_INSTANCE_ID that can be used on application level to do some instance-id based logic, such as opening correct ports etc.

Below you can find a sample file from the demo app:

# .plcli.yml

bootstrap_cmds:
  - /usr/local/bin/python3.7 -m venv env
  - . ./env/bin/activate
  - pip install --upgrade pip  
  - pip install -r requirements.txt 
  - deactivate
env:
  FLASK_APP: app.py
  PORT: 8080
launch_cmds:
  - . ./env/bin/activate
  - flask run --host=0.0.0.0 --port=$(($PORT + $PLCLI_INSTANCE_ID))

Actually deploying the application

See the documentation for the deploy command!