vessel-cli: A Go repository from Vessel

Remote Dev Environments

Remote dev environments that feel local. Powered by Fly.io.

What?

Installing tons of development stuff onto your workstation sucks. Let's not but say we did.

This project:

Creates an app on Fly.io that has your dependencies in it.
Syncs your local code into the app on-the-fly
Forwards defined ports (e.g. open localhost:8000 in your browser)

The Fly app turns off automatically when you disconnect from it, so it's not running 24/7.

It'll turn back on automatically when you re-connect.

How to Use This

Here's how to install and use Vessel.

1️⃣ Install

First, install dependencies:

Install flyctl and create a Fly account via fly auth signup
Install vessel

For Mac/Linux, you can install vessel this way:

# 👉 Don't forget to follow instructions to add ~/.vessel/bin to your $PATH
curl https://vessel.fly.dev/install.sh | sh

2️⃣ Authenticate

Then authenticate Vessel

# If you already logged in with `fly auth login`
vessel auth

# Else, if you have a Fly API token
vessel auth -t YOUR_TOKEN_HERE

This gives Vessel access to the Fly API token that you'd like to use. If the API token is specific to your default organization, we'll use that. Otherwise, we'll prompt to ask which organization to use. Each Fly.io organization is billed separately.

3️⃣ Start a project

Head to a code base and run initialize your project.

# Probably a Laravel project
cd ~/Code/some-laravel-project
vessel init

🔁 Usage

Once that's finished, run the start command to enable file syncing / port forwarding.

# Start syncing/port forwarding
vessel start

# `start` is a long-running command. You can run it in the background if you want:
vessel start -d

# Run some commands to get dependencies in your server
## (Dependencies aren't synced)
## You can also run `vessel cmd <some command here>`
vessel -- composer install
vessel -- "npm install && npm run build"

# Open http://localhost:8000 in your browser
vessel open

# Use this when syncing in the background:
vessel stop

SSH and Commands

You can run one-off commands and SSH into your environments.

Note

File syncing (and port forwarding) is done via mutagen, which also works over SSH.

One-Off Commands

Vessel supports one-off commands two ways:

vessel -- composer install - This will run composer install after connecting to your dev env
vessel cmd npm install - Similarly, This will run npm install after connecting to the dev env

Commands are run from the ~/app directory within the dev environment. If you run a one-off command without first syncing, you may get errors about the ~/app working directory not existing.

SSH

This project configures an easy way to SSH into the dev environment. After you run vessel init, check your ~/.ssh/config file to see a new entry created there. You should be able to SSH to the server without the vessel command:

# SSH via vessel
vessel ssh

# SSH outside of Vessel
# This will match a host set in ~/.ssh/config
ssh vessel-<my-project-name> # e.g. `ssh vessel-my-app`

Custom Dev Environments

The vessel init command asks what Docker base image you want to use. Fly.io takes a Docker image and transforms it into a real VM.

Vessel provides a few base images for PHP, but you are free to create your own by extending the vesselapp/base:latest base image (which is an Ubuntu 20:04 image).

For now, you can create a container image and publish it to Docker Hub as a public image.

Then, during the vessel init steps, you can choose Other for the Docker image and define your custom image e.g. some-username/some-image:tag.

Private image support should be possible to support. See #11.

Project Configuration

Your project will contain a vessel.yml file. You can customize configuration there!

By default, Vessel will forward localhost:8000 to port 80 in the development environment, allowing you to view your application without exposing it to the world.

You can forward additional local ports to other remote ports by adding to the forwarding list:

# Add to this list to forward additional ports
forwarding:
  - 8000:80

You can adjust what files/directories get ignored (don't get synced to the remote server) as well:

# Add or remove from this list
# See https://mutagen.io/documentation/synchronization/ignores for details
ignore:
  - node_modules
  - vendor

Note

Vessel ignores your .git directory in all cases via Mutagen's --ignore-vcs flag.

Global Configuration

You'll find global configuration and a debug log file in ~/.vessel:

~/.vessel/config.yml - Configuration including your Fly API token and the Fly organization used
~/.vessel/debug.log - Logs to help troubleshoot issues
~/.vessel/envs/<your-project> - A directory containing SSH keys used to access your dev environment

Destroying an Environment

You can delete any app within Fly.io directly, but Vessel provides a command to cleanup local files and destroy the VM.

# Destroy the Fly VM and local files
vessel destroy

# Destroy only local files, this is handy if
# you deleted the app in Fly.io's dashboard
vessel destroy --files-only

Debugging

Try adding the -v flag to any vessel command to get complete errors output directly to your console, e.g. vessel -v init.

Additionally, use LOG_LEVEL=debug vessel ... to get a bit more information output to your ~/.vessel/debug.log file.

Windows users

I haven't had a chance to test this on Windows.

Theoretically I've made the code work for Windows, but there's testing and setup to be done (based on Mutagen's requirements).

Ephemeral Environments

The environments will shut down after 5 minutes of inactivity. An environment is "inactive" when there are no active SSH connections (file syncing via vessel start counts as an active SSH session).

The good news is that you won't be charged for usage when environments are not in use. However, the environments are ephemeral. When you start an environment back up, it's as if you're starting from a blank slate. Your files will get re-synced when you run vessel start next, but you'll need to ensure any data you need is put back into place (for now!).

I use sqlite for all development in this fashion (for as long as I can get away with it!), as it lets me easily have my "state" synced to the dev environment.

Making API Calls to Fly.io

During the init step, we run flyctl machine api-proxy in the background. This proxies requests from localhost:4280 to _api.internal:4280. This _api.internal address is actually a private network address that works from within Fly.io's private networks.

The other way to talk to Fly.io's Machines API is to log into your organizations private network via VPN. Instructions on setting up Fly.io's Private Networt VPN are found here.

If you use that method instead, you can:

Talk to your VM's directly via *.internal hostnames
Use vessel by setting the FLY_HOST environment variable

 export FLY_HOST="_api.internal"
 vessel init

Why Vessel?

This is the result of some fun I had using Fly's Machines API to make remote development environment.

It's inspired by:

Me having a new computer and not wanting to install so much crap into it
Amos's article on remote dev on Fly (This project is a bit different, but I totally stole his Rust code)

Vessel-App/vessel-cli