Tarantool application starter

• tarantool >= 1.6
• luarocks (for lua 5.1)

Clone and run

bin/tntstartapp /path/to/app

You can add bin/ folder to your PATH variable to run in arbitrary directory:

cd /path/to/my/app
tntstartapp .

The main idea behind this appstarter is to provide you with a default approach of developing apps for Tarantool. To create a project starter you can run

mkdir -p /path/to/app
tntstartapp /path/to/app

And you'll end up with a default structure of an app. There are some important parts in it:

1. dep.lua and meta.yaml. Luarocks spec files does not support specifying dependencies on GH projects (via link to *.rockspec file), but the luarocks itself does. So, meta.yaml is a place where you drop your external dependencies (like a package.json for npm or requirements.txt for pip). You can specify either tarantool modules there (in the tntdeps section) by there names (like queue or http) or just bare links to *.rockspec files (in the deps section). Then a bundled dep.lua script will use this meta.yaml file to install all the required dependencies to a specified location.
2. Makefile. There are 2 main commands there:

• make dep - This command installs all the dependencies from meta.yaml to a local folder .rocks inside your project (already in bundled .gitignore)
• make run. After a successful installation of dependencies you can run your application. Practically it just creates a temporary folder .tnt_{LISTEN_URI}, cd's inside and runs tarantool init.lua.

3. init.lua - An entry point to your entire application. Specifically, it does this:

• patches package.path and package.cpath to import packages from ./.rocks and ./app folders directly.
• require's package.reload module
• require's config module (please refer to @mons's tnt-config module for more details). By default (if not specified in ENV variable CONF) it uses config file from /etc/{your_app_name}/conf.lua
• Runs require('app'). Which is essentially is run of your application.
• Also it starts the interactive console immediately (so you don't need to explicitly connect to your Tarantool instance)

4. app. This is a directory that contains all of your application code. It is absolutely up to you how you organize your code in this folder. By default app/init.lua require's your inner application module and registers in the package-reload module. So when code reload happens, the destroy function of your module is called (to cleanup resources, stop fibers or whatever you want).

The recommended way to deploy apps with tarantool-appstarter is to the following file structure:

/
├── etc
│   └── {{__appname__}}
│       └── conf.lua
└── usr
    └── share
        └── {{__appname__}}
            ├── init.lua
            ├── app/
            └── .rocks/

As you can see, init.lua, app folder and .rocks folder (so you, obviously, need to bundle your dep or rpm package with your dependencies) deploy to /usr/share/{appname}/, and conf.lua deploys to /etc/{appname}/conf.lua.

In order to run your applcation by either tarantoolctl or systemd you need to do the following:

• put a symlink /etc/tarantool/instances.enabled/{appname}.lua -> /usr/share/{appname}/init.lua.
• execute either tarantoolctl start {appname} or systemctl start tarantool@appname.

After all of that, if you want to hot-reload your application you just deploy your new code, connect to your running instance by any preferred method (for example, by executing tarantoolctl enter {appname}) and run package.reload(). That should be it.