FTL

"FTL" stands for "faster than light", and represents a strategy for constructing container images quickly.

In this context, the "speed of light" is considered to be the time taken to do a standard "docker build" followed by a "docker push" to a registry.

By constructing the container image layers cleverly and reproducibly, we can use the registry as a cache and speed up the build/push steps of many common language package managers.

This repository currently contains Cloud Build steps and binaries for Node.js, Python and PHP languages and package managers.

Usage

The typical usage of an FTL binary is:

$ ftl.par --directory=$dir --base=$base --image=$img

This command can be read as "Build the source code in directory $dir into an image named $img, based on the image $base.

These binaries do not depend on Docker, and construct images directly in the registry.

As an example, we will demonstrate using the Node FTL builder to create a container for a node application from a node app's source code: Assume we are deploying the node source for the app https://github.com/JustinBeckwith/cloudcats. First download the node ftl.par file from https://storage.googleapis.com/gcp-container-tools/ftl/node/latest/ftl.par. Then we run the ftl.par file pointing to our application:

$ ftl.par --directory=$HOME/cloudcats/web --base=gcr.io/google-appengine/nodejs:latest --image=gcr.i
o/my-project/cloudcats-node-app:latest

Releases

Currently FTL is released in .par format for each supported runtime. The latest release is v0.18.0, changelog here

node

v0.18.0

HEAD

Specific version (based on git $COMMIT_SHA) https://storage.googleapis.com/gcp-container-tools/ftl/node/$COMMIT_SHA/ftl.par

python

v0.18.0

HEAD

Specific version (based on git $COMMIT_SHA) https://storage.googleapis.com/gcp-container-tools/ftl/python/$COMMIT_SHA/ftl.par

php

v0.18.0

HEAD

Specific version (based on git $COMMIT_SHA) https://storage.googleapis.com/gcp-container-tools/ftl/php/$COMMIT_SHA/ftl.par

Building and Running

FTL is built using bazel so bazel must be installed. NOTE: FTL requires a bazel version of 0.19.1 due to syntax changes in later versions. To build artifacts with FTL, use bazel build and then one of the bazel rules specified in a BUILD file. The most common rules are //ftl:node_builder, //ftl:python_builder, and //ftl:python_builder. To run FTL locally, bazel run can be used, passing flag args to the command. An example is below:

bazel run //ftl:python_builder -- \
  --base=gcr.io/google-appengine/python:latest \
  --name=gcr.io/aprindle-vm/python-ftl-v50:latest \
  --directory=$(pwd)/ftl/python/testdata/packages_test  \
  --virtualenv-dir=$HOME/env \
  --verbosity=INFO

FTL also supports a --tar_base_image_path=$TARGET_PATH flag if users do not which to upload to a registry

Developing - Integration Tests

To run the FTL integration tests, run the following command locally from the root directory:

python ftl/ftl_<RUNTIME={node,php,python}>_integration_tests_yaml.py | gcloud builds submit --config /dev/fd/0 .

FTL Runtime Design Documents

php

python