Re: Swineherd: Guix System container manager

[Thompson, David]

Hey, nice job Ricardo! This looks awesome!

On Wed, Sep 13, 2023 at 11:29 AM Katherine Cox-Buday
<cox.katherine.e@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/13/23 3:06 AM, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> > Hi there,
> >
> > you know the Shepherd: it is an elegant service manager looking after a
> > herd of daemons.  Since it can be extended with Guile, I decided to do
> > just that to add an extra skill to the Shepherd, turning it into the
> > Swineherd.
> >
> > The Swineherd is a manager of Guix System containers.  It is implemented
> > as a Shepherd service called “swineherd” that lets you manage Guix
> > System containers as Shepherd services.  These system container services
> > implement a few common features to bring up bridge networking, execute
> > commands inside the containers, peek at files, and get simple usage
> > stats.
> >
> > Swineherd also provides an optional HTTP API server to launch, manage,
> > and destroy containers through an HTTP client.  This makes the Swineherd
> > useful for building web applications that launch Guix System containers
> > on demand.  It comes with an Info manual describing the assumptions, the
> > required setup, as well as the implemented commands and the HTTP API.
> >
> > The Swineherd was designed to be used with Shepherd on foreign distros,
> > so it does not assume to be running on top of Guix System (for better or
> > worse).
> >
> > You can find the code here:
> >
> >      https://github.com/BIMSBbioinfo/swineherd
> >
> > Of course the Swineherd is also available as a Guix package called
> > “swineherd”.
> >
> > If this tickles your interests I’d be very happy to hear your comments
> > and incorporate patches to extend it beyond my original requirements.
>
> This is really cool stuff! I'd love to see Guix continue to eat the
> dev-ops space, which, in my opinion, loves to stack complexity on top of
> complexity.

+1 to that. I did devops professionally for about 6 years and it
really is a mess.

> Can you share any ways you're currently using this?
>
> Any plans/interest in hooking it into `guix deploy`?

Hey now that's a cool idea!

Speaking of devops, I believe with swineherd it is now possible to
implement something I've wanted for many years: the Guix equivalent of
docker-compose.  It would be like an enhanced guix shell that also
starts up services needed for development like PostgreSQL or Redis or
whatever.

- Dave