Spurious

Spurious is a toolset allowing development against a subset of AWS resources, locally.

The services are run as Docker containers, and Spurious manages their lifecycle and linking so all you have to worry about is using the services.

To use Spurious, you'll need to change the endpoint and port for each AWS service to those provided by Spurious.

There are a number of supporting libraries that ease the configuration of the AWS SDKs.

Supported services

Currently the following AWS services are supported by Spurious:

• S3 (fake-s3)
• SQS (fake_sqs)
• DynamoDB (DynamoDB Local)
• ElastiCache (fake_elasticache)
• Spurious Browser (spurious-browser)

The following services are actively in development:

• SNS
• CloudFormation (Allow you to create resources that there are already services for in Spurious).

Requirements

Spurious works on the following platforms:

• OSX
• Linux
• Windows

Dependencies

Spurious requires the following to be installed and started to work correctly:

• Ruby 1.9.* (or JRuby)
• Docker 1.0.*

Installation

Quick install

curl -L https://raw.github.com/stevenjack/spurious/master/tools/install.sh | sh

Manual install

Docker

Each of the local services are run inside a Docker container, so without Docker, Spurious won't work.

As OSX doesn't currently have support for LXC containers natively, you need to run a VM that is capable of providing this.

The quickest way to get Docker setup on OSX is with a combination of homebrew, docker-machine and VirutalBox

brew install docker-machine docker

Once you've installed both of these, run the following commands to start the docker-machine:

docker-machine create development

Once the process has completed, you will need to add an environment variable with command below, make sure that this is exported before continuing, as Spurious makes use of this.

docker-machine env development

Alternative VM setup

docker-machine is just one route of being able to run Docker containers from Mac OSX. You can use a number of other virtual machines, just make sure you've exposed the Docker API and you can connect to the VM on its own IP address so you can construct the following environment variable:

DOCKER_HOST=tcp://{IP_OF_HOST:DOCKER_API_PORT}

Spurious

Spurious is currently implemented in Ruby (move to golang is in progress) and so it requires you to install the Spurious CLI tools from a RubyGem

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'spurious'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install spurious

This will install Spurious and give you the CLI tools for starting the server and interacting with it.

Usage

Spurious is split up into two components, the CLI and the server. The server interacts with the Docker API and controls the lifecycle of the containers. The CLI simply talks to the server and formats the responses for the end user.

The server runs as a daemon and must be run before using the CLI. If it's not running, then the CLI will prompt you. To enter a directory.

To start the server, run:

spurious-server start

You can check the status of the server by running:

spurious-server status

and stop it with:

spurious-server stop

Once you've started the server you can start using the Spurious CLI tool. Run the following commands to get the containers up and running:

spurious init
spurious up|boot|start

You should now have six containers running, which you can check with:

docker ps

GUI

One of the services started by Spurious is the browser. This allows you to interact and manage the fake services from a graphical interface.

To access the browser service, enter the following command:

spurious ports

This should display output similar to:

Service                      Host                         Port   Browser link
spurious-dynamo              dynamodb.spurious.localhost  49255  http://dynamodb.spurious.localhost:49255
spurious-browser             browser.spurious.localhost   49259  http://browser.spurious.localhost:49259 <--- Link to browser
spurious-elasticache         192.168.59.103               49257  -
spurious-elasticache-docker  192.168.59.103               49258  -
spurious-memcached           192.168.59.103               49256  -
spurious-s3                  s3.spurious.localhost        49254  http://s3.spurious.localhost:49254
spurious-sqs                 sqs.spurious.localhost       49253  http://sqs.spurious.localhost:49253

You'll find the browser link next to the service spurious-browser.

Using the containers

Once the containers are up and running, they're assigned random port numbers from Docker which are available on the ip address of the VM used to run the containers. To make the discovery of these ports simpler there's the following command:

spurious ports

This will return a list of host and port details for each of the Spurious containers. If you pass the flag --json you'll get the results back as a JSON string so you can then parse and use to automatically configure your chosen method of working with AWS (e.g. some of the helper libraries - see below - utilise this method).

Debug mode

To enable debug output when running Spurious, either use the command line argument:

spurious init --debug-mode=true

Or set the SPURIOUS_DEBUG environment variable before running the init command:

SPURIOUS_DEBUG=true spurious init

SDK Helpers

Once the containers are running you'll need to wire up the SDK to point to the correct endpoints and port numbers. Here's an example using the Ruby SDK:

require 'json'

port_config = JSON.parse(`spurious ports --json`)

AWS.config(
  :region              => 'eu-west-1',
  :use_ssl             => false,
  :access_key_id       => "access",
  :secret_access_key   => "secret",
  :dynamo_db_endpoint  => port_config['spurious-dynamo']['Host'],
  :dynamo_db_port      => port_config['spurious-dynamo']['HostPort'],
  :sqs_endpoint        => port_config['spurious-sqs']['Host'],
  :sqs_port            => port_config['spurious-sqs']['HostPort'],
  :s3_endpoint         => port_config['spurious-s3']['Host'],
  :s3_port             => port_config['spurious-s3']['HostPort'],
  :s3_force_path_style => true
)

There are also helpers available for the different flavours of the AWS SDK:

• Ruby
• Clojure
• Javascript

PHP/Java/Go...

Coming soon

Contributing

1. Fork it ( http://github.com/spurious-io/spurious/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request