Introduction

The ZeroVM Package Manager, ZPM, is the tool you use to create and deploy ZeroVM applications.

Creating a ZeroVM Application

We will use a simple Python application as our running example.

Note

As of version 0.1, ZPM only supports Python applications with no third-party dependencies.

To get started, we will show how to package a very simple “Hello World” application. There will be just one file, hello.py, with the expected content:

print "Hello from ZeroVM!"

To bundle this into a zapp, ZPM needs a configuration file called zapp.yaml.

Configuration File

The zapp.yaml file will look like this:

meta:
  Version: "0.1"
  name: hello
  Author-email: Martin Geisler <martin@geisler.net>
  Summary: A small Hello World app

execution:
  groups:
    - name: hello
      path: file://python2.7:python
      args: /hello.py
      devices:
      - name: python2.7
      - name: stdout

help:
  description: A small "Hello World" app.

bundling:
  - hello.py

The file is in YAML format and describes the program to execute, some meta data about it, help about the program and its arguments (this program has none), and finally information about which files to include when bundling. The different sections are described in more detail in The zapp.yaml File.

Bundling

Simply running zpm bundle will create the hello.zapp:

$ zpm bundle
adding /home/mg/src/hello/hello.py
adding /home/mg/src/hello/zapp.yaml
created hello.zapp

You see the files added to the zapp — here it’s simply hello.py together with the zapp.yaml file containing the meta data.

You can now publish hello.zapp on your webserver, send it to your friends, etc. They will be able to run it after they deploy it like we describe next.

Deployment

To deploy hello.zapp, you need access to a ZeroCloud cluster (Swift running the ZeroVM middleware). For help on configuring zpm to access a ZeroCloud cluster, see ZeroCloud Authentication Config.

We will deploy it to a test container under the folder hello:

$ zpm deploy test/hello hello.zapp
deploying hello.zapp
found token: MIIGjwYJKoZIhvcNAQcC...
found Swift: http://localhost:8080/v1/account
uploading 398 bytes to test/hello/hello.zapp
updated test/hello/hello.zapp succesfully

For testing, you can execute the job after it has been deployed:

$ zpm deploy test/hello hello.zapp --execute
deploying hello.zapp
found token: MIIGjwYJKoZIhvcNAQcC...
found Swift: http://localhost:8080/v1/account
uploading 398 bytes to test/hello/hello.zapp
updated test/hello/hello.zapp succesfully
job template:
[{'exec': {'args': '/hello.py', 'path': u'file://python2.7:python'},
  'devices': [{'name': u'python2.7'},
              {'name': u'stdout'},
              {'name': 'image',
               'path': u'swift://account/test/hello/hello.zapp'}],
  'name': u'hello'}]
executing
<Response [200]>
Hello from ZeroVM!

There currently is no support for executing the application later. Issue #37 deals with that.