Deploying Your First Service

Once the MVI Manager is up and running you are ready to start using MVI. The fastest and easiest way to interact with the Manager is to use the Command-line Interface (CLI). The CLI contains a host of useful commands that make the deployment and monitoring of services fast and painless.

Note

You can call mvi --help at any time, to get a list and short description of the available commands and mvi <COMMAND> --help to get a longer description of that command.

Logging in to the Manager

The first step is to login to the host where MVI is running. To do this, we call the login command:

>>> mvi login 
Enter MVI host: http://<your-host
Username: <username>
Password: <password>

Once you have logged in you are connected to your specified host and able to communicate with the Manager running there. Logins last for a week, before you have to login again. We can check if we are logged in by calling:

>>> mvi ls 
MAIN    NAME    VERSION    STATUS    RUNNING
------  ------  ---------  --------  ---------

It should return an empty list. If you didn’t log in, you would get this message:

>>> mvi ls 
You must log in to a MVI host with `mvi login` before using this command.
Aborted!

Creating a New Service

When creating a new service we recommend the user to create a project template with:

>>> mvi init 
project_name [my_project]: my_first_mvi_project

This creates a new directory called my_first_mvi_project in your current working directory. Let’s see what’s in it:

>>> ls -a ./my_first_mvi_project 
.  ..  .s2i/  README.md  requirements.txt  service.py  tests/

Let’s not worry about the .s2i/ and tests/ directories for now. README.md contains documentation about the service, requirements.txt contains the dependencies of the service, and lastly service.py contains the code that will be running in the service. The code is fully functional and creates a hello world service. Let’s deploy that straight away!

Deploying the Service

The CLI has a command to deploy a service. It requires you to give it a name and version and then specify the path to the project directory.

>>> mvi deploy my_first_service 0.0.1 ./my_first_mvi_project 
Deploying service...
Service deployed successfully
MAIN    NAME              VERSION    STATUS    RUNNING
------  ----------------  ---------  --------  -----------------------------------
*       my_first_service  0.0.1      running   Running (since 2020-11-20 15:48:45)

After a few seconds the service should be up and running. We can check with mvi ls that it started properly.

>>> mvi ls 
MAIN    NAME              VERSION    STATUS    RUNNING
------  ----------------  ---------  --------  -----------------------------------
*       my_first_service  0.0.1      running   Running (since 2020-11-20 15:48:45)

If you open http://your-host in your browser you should see the dashboard where you can get much of the same information as through the CLI. And at http://your-host/services/my_first_service_0.0.1/docs you can read the automated API documentation of the service and test its functionality.

Note

To communicate with your services from outside of the documentation you can use any HTTP library, which are available in most programming languages. In python requests is commonly used, or curl in bash.

Killing a Service

Say that you are finished with your service, then the process can be stopped and the service removed by calling:

>>> mvi kill my_first_service 0.0.1 
MAIN    NAME              VERSION    STATUS    RUNNING
------  ----------------  ---------  --------  -----------------------------------
*       my_first_service  0.0.1      running   Running (since 2020-11-20 15:48:45)
Are you sure you want to kill the above service(s)? [y/N]: y
Service my_first_service 0.0.1 killed.

What’s next?

Now that you know the basics of how to deploy a service using the CLI it might be time to learn how to write your own service: Creating Your Own service, or maybe take a look at the Command-line Interface documentaion.