Managing Multiple Environments

Sooner or later, you’re likely to find yourself needing multiple Genvid Toolbox cloud environments. It may be as simple as having separate debug and production environments, or you might have different setups for multiple products.

This section covers handling multiple environments using profiles and how to customize your own tools to work with them.

Custom Environment Profiles

When managing multiple environments, it can be tedious to ensure the environment is properly set when switching from one to another. To simplify this, the Genvid Toolbox supports named profiles.

For example, say you want to adjust the verbosity of the tools depending on whether you’re in the debug or production environment. You can do this by writing your own profiles in ~/.genvid/profile.

profile "production" {
  GENVID_TOOLBOX_LOGLEVEL = "INFO"
}

profile "debug" {
  GENVID_TOOLBOX_LOGLEVEL = "DEBUG"
}

Now you can set GENVID_PROFILE to either production or debug and it will update the environment accordingly.

$ export GENVID_PROFILE="debug"
$ genvid-bastion env
> [...]
> GENVID_TOOLBOX_LOGLEVEL="DEBUG"
> [...]

$ export GENVID_PROFILE="production"
$ genvid-bastion env
> [...]
> GENVID_TOOLBOX_LOGLEVEL="INFO"
> [...]

The genvid-bastion env subcommand shows the environment currently in use by the tools. You can review the differences between the default profiles for suggestions on how to create your own.

Warning

If you set a profile name, it must exist.

See also

genvid.toolbox.Profile

Customizing Profile Files Location

To search for a profile, the toolbox parses each path defined in GENVID_PROFILES_PATH until it finds the desired profile.

It can be set to a list of paths separated by os.pathsep where each path is either a normal file or a directory that will be searched recursively. Feel free to store your profiles in a structure that makes sense for your needs.

Warning

There cannot be conflicting profile names under the same path.

Creating Custom Tools Compatible with Profiles

If you decide to use profiles in your own script, you will want it to interoperate with profiles like the rest of the toolbox. You can do that by creating a Profile object into your script and calling the apply() method before creating your BaseTool instance of one of its children.

Then you pass the profile instance to the tool’s main() method.

def main():
    profile = Profile()
    profile.apply()

    os.environ.setdefault("GENVID_TOOLBOX_LOGLEVEL", "INFO")

    tool = ToolboxBuilder()
    return tool.main(profile=profile)

This code does three things:

  1. The constructor for Profile finds and loads the active profile into memory.

  2. profile.apply() gives a default value to every environment variable defined in the active profile. Note that it must be called before setting any default environment variables or creating the BaseTool instance.

  3. Finally, the code passes the applied profile to main() for diagnosis purposes.

See Profile for more information about integrating profiles with your custom tools.