This repository contains the code for the Droplet Execution Agent (DEA) and related components.

The DEA itself is written in Ruby and takes care of managing an application instance's lifecycle. It can be instructed by the Cloud Controller to start and stop application instances. It keeps track of all started instances, and periodically broadcasts messages about their state over NATS (meant to be picked up by the Health Manager).

The advantages of this generation of the DEA over the previous (and first) generation DEA is that is more modular and has better test coverage. A breaking change between the two is that this version of the DEA depends on Warden to run application instances.

The directory server is written in Go and can be found in the go/ directory. It is a replacement for the older directory server that was embedded in the DEA itself.

Requests for directories/files are handled by the DEA, which responds with a HTTP redirect to a URL that hits the directory server directly. The URL is signed by the DEA, and the directory server checks the validity of the URL with the DEA before serving it.

You can run the dea executable at the command line by passing the path to a YAML configuration file:

bin/dea config/dea.yml

The following is a partial list of the keys that are read from the YAML file:

• logging - a Steno configuration
• nats_servers - an array of URIs of the form nats://host:port that the DEA will use to connect to NATS.
• warden_socket - the path to a unix domain socket that the DEA will use to communicate to a warden server.
• instance.nproc_limit - sets the system ulimit for the number of processes within an application container

When contributing to DEA it is useful to run it as a standalone component.

In the following examples, we assume that you have cloned the cf-release repository into ~/workspace/cf-release. If you use a different path, you need to adjust the path in the DEA Vagrantfile to point to the correct location of cf-release, otherwise you will most likely get this error when you try to create the Vagrant VM:

vm:
* The host path of the shared folder is missing: ~/workspace/cf-release

In this case, simply edit the Vagrantfile to insert the correct path and retry creating the VM.

If you are able to bring up the VM, but the tests terminate quickly with this error message:

bash: /var/cf-release/src/dea-hm-workspace/src/dea_next/bin/start_warden_and_run_specs.sh: No such file or directory

then either the repository is incomplete/corrupted, or the directory mounted simply does not actually point to the cloned repository. Check that the location into which you've cloned cf-release matches the source path for the mount in the Vagrantfile, remove the existing VM with vagrant destroy (be sure to run this from the dea_next directory so that you do not accidentally delete other VMs you may have running), and then retry VM creation and test execution.

The DEA integration tests run against real Warden, directory, and NATS servers, so they must be run in a Vagrant VM. The bin directory contains a helper script that runs the entire DEA test suite:

bash

# Checkout the required repos
mkdir ~/workspace
cd ~/workspace
git clone https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-release
cd cf-release
scripts/update
bosh sync blobs # required to download rootfs blob
cd src/dea-hm-workspace
git checkout master
git submodule update --init --recursive
cd src/dea_next; git checkout master

# Verify that Vagrant version is at least 1.5
vagrant --version

# Ensure the guest additions plugin is installed
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

# Run test suite in Vagrant vm
bin/run_specs_in_vm.sh

This will stand up the test virtual machine (if it is not already running) and run both the unit and integration suites. Note that the integration tests stage and run real applications, which requires an internet connection. They take 5-10 minutes to run, depending on your connection speed.

To run tests individually, there is a bit of setup:

#start vagrant
vagrant up

#shell into the VM
vagrant ssh

#create rootfs
mkdir -p /tmp/warden/rootfs
sudo tar -xvf /var/cf-release/.blobs/`basename $(readlink /var/cf-release/blobs/rootfs/*)` -C /tmp/warden/rootfs

#start warden
cd /var/cf-release/src/warden/warden
sudo bundle install
bundle exec rake setup:bin
sudo bundle exec rake warden:start[config/linux.yml] &> /tmp/warden.log &

# start the DEA's dependencies
cd /var/cf-release/src/dea_next
sudo bundle install
sudo bundle exec foreman start &> /tmp/foreman.log &

#To run the tests (unit or integration - these must be run separately if run as suites):
bundle install
bundle exec rspec spec/{spec_file_name}

To watch the internal NATS traffic while the tests run, do this in another ssh session:

nats-sub ">" -s nats://localhost:4222

See staging.rb for staging flow.

• staging.advertise: Stagers (now DEA's) broadcast their capacity/capability

• staging.locate: Stagers respond to any message on this subject with a staging.advertise message (CC uses this to bootstrap)

• staging.<uuid>.start: Stagers respond to requests on this subject to stage apps

For details about how to use and update the Warden rootfs, see the stacks documentation.

The DEA's logging is handled by Steno. The DEA can be configured to log to a file, a syslog server or both. If neither is provided, it will log to its stdout.

The following log levels exist, shown with an example of what they are used for:

• error - DEA failed to download builpack cache, cannot create PID file
• warn - DEA failed to destroy a warden container, DEA received invalid JSON message over NATS
• info - DEA is shutting down, DEA received a request to stage/run an app, but didn't have the resources
• debug2 - DEA received request for instance information, but was not running the specified app
• debug - DEA saved a snapshot, downloaded a droplet

• droplet.* - logging relevant to an app's instance
• staging.* - logging relevant to the staging of an app's bits
• dea.* - component-level logging for the DEA itself

Please read the contributors' guide