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Deployment

Development / Testing

In addition to running a native binary as described in the quick start guide, there are three options for running a Liftbridge cluster locally for development and testing purposes:

• Docker - single-node Liftbridge cluster backed by a single-node NATS cluster in one container
• Docker Compose - three-node Liftbridge cluster backed by a single-node NATS cluster in separate containers
• Kind (Kubernetes in Docker) - three-node Liftbridge cluster backed by a three-node NATS cluster running inside a local Kubernetes cluster

Docker

There is a container image available which runs an instance of Liftbridge and NATS inside a single Docker container for development and testing purposes. In effect, this runs a single-node Liftbridge cluster on your machine.

Use the following Docker commands to run the container:

$ docker pull liftbridge/standalone-dev
$ docker run -d --name=liftbridge-main -p 4222:4222 -p 9292:9292 -p 8222:8222 -p 6222:6222 liftbridge/standalone-dev

This will run the container which will start both the NATS and Liftbridge servers. To check the logs to see if the container started properly, run:

$ docker logs liftbridge-main

When running the container, you can optionally specify the mount point with:

--volume=/tmp/host/liftbridge:/tmp/liftbridge/liftbridge-default

This container exposes several ports described below.

Liftbridge server exposes:

• 9292 for clients connections

NATS server exposes:

• 4222 for clients connections
• 8222 as an HTTP management port for information reporting and monitoring
• 6222 is a routing port for clustering

Docker Compose

This will bring up three Liftbridge containers and one NATS node using Docker Compose:

$ make compose-up

To tear it down, run:

$ make compose-down

Kind

This will deploy a three-node Liftbridge cluster backed by a three-node NATS cluster locally using Kind. For this you'll also need Skaffold and Kustomize in addition to Kind.

Download them:

• kind version 0.5.1 or above
• kustomize version 3.3.0 or above
• skaffold version 0.41.0 or later

To provision a local Kind cluster, run:

$ make kind-up

Then deploy the manifests including the NATS operator and the Liftbridge cluster with:

$ make kind-apply

To export the KUBECONFIG environment variable and point kubectl to the right context, run:

$ make kind-export

After running this, you can then use kubectl as normal to interact with the local Kubernetes cluster.

To tear down your local environment, run:

$ make kind-down