Project creation guide

This guide explains how to create a project. For detailed documentation see: project.yml.

Create a new source project

The Inmanta compiler expects a project with basic configuration. This project is a directory that contains the source code of the configuration model. This project also matches with a project defined on the server, from which multiple environments can be deployed.

pip install cookiecutter
cookiecutter gh:inmanta/inmanta-project-template

Note

The cookiecutter template also sets up git for the new project. This is a best practice to version control your infrastructure code.

Inside the project the compiler expects a project.yml file that defines metadata about the project, the location to store modules, repositories where to find modules and possibly specific versions of modules. project.yml provides an overview about the supported metadata attributes.

An example project.yml could be:

name: test
description: a test project
author: Inmanta
author_email: code@inmanta.com
license: ASL 2.0
copyright: 2020 Inmanta
modulepath: libs
downloadpath: libs
repo:
    - https://github.com/inmanta/
install_mode: release
requires:

The main file

The main.cf is the place where the compiler starts executing code first. For example, the main.cf below calls the print plugin from the std module.

std::print("hello world")

Note

The std module is the only module that does not have to be imported explicitly.

This example can be executed with inmanta compile

This prints out “hello world” on stdout. The first execution takes longer because Inmanta needs to fetch (clone) the std module from github. Subsequently compiles will use the std module downloaded to the libs directory.