Microservice CLI Workflows

Dependencies

Before you can manage Beamable Standalone Microservices, you need to complete the Getting-Started Guide. That means having Dotnet 8 installed, and getting the Beam CLI.

You can confirm you have everything installed checking the versions of the tools.

dotnet --version
beam version # beam --version also works.

Creating New Projects

New Microservices, Storages, and Common projects can be created within an existing .beamable folder workspace.

Use the beam project new commands to create new projects.

dotnet beam project new service <name> # create a new Microservice
dotnet beam project new storage <name> # create a new Storage
dotnet beam project new common-lib <name> # create a new Common Library

All of these commands will create a new .csproj project and configure it to work with Beamable. The new .csproj will be referenced in the .sln file. If there is already a .sln file, then the first .sln file detected in the .beamable workspace will be modified to include the .csproj reference. If there is no .sln, then a file called BeamableServices.sln will be created. However, the --sln option may be given to override this behavior and specify a .sln file to use.

Projects will be created in the /services directory by default.

Finding Microservices

Once there is a Microservice in your .beamable workspace, you can check for its existence by running the project list command. It will return services detected in your workspace.

MyProject % dotnet beam project list
 {                                             
    "localServices": [                         
       {                                       
          "name": "HelloWorld",                
          "projectPath": "services/HelloWorld" 
       }                                       
    ],                                         
    "localStorages": [                         
    ]                                          
 } 

Running Microservices

Microservices can be run in several ways,

1. using the IDE,
2. using dotnet commands directly, or
3. using beam commands.

The project run command will turn on a service.

dotnet beam project run --ids HelloWorld

Optionally, you can enable hot-reload by passing the -w flag.

Checking Running Microservices

You can use the project ps command to check for running services. If you run the command while no services are running, the output will be empty. However, if the command is executed while a Microservice is running, then it will be displayed.

MyProject % dotnet beam project ps
HelloWorld is available prefix=[Chriss-MacBook-Pro-2] docker=[False]

The prefix in the log declares that the service is running locally, and the docker log declares that the service is running through dotnet, and not inside a docker container.

Optionally, you can pass the -w flag to watch for changes to running services.

Stopping Services

If a service is running, then the project stop command may be used to stop the program. If the service is not running, then the command will have no output. However, if the service is running, it will log a stop message.

MyProject % dotnet beam project stop --ids HelloWorld
stopped HelloWorld.

When a service is stopped this way, you should expect to see a log in the Microservice itself,

[Info] Stopping service through debug-server due to reason=[cli-request]

Observing Logs

When a service is run, the process that starts the service should receive the log outputs. For example, if the service is run through the IDE, then the IDE should emit the logs from the service. However, it is possible to attach to the logs of a running service from a separate process.

For example, imagine that a service is run through dotnet directly,

dotnet dotnet run --project services/HelloWorld

Then, in a separate terminal window, the project logs command can be used to tail the logs.

MyProject % dotnet beam project logs HelloWorld
[Debug] Skipped get_ServiceProvider
[Debug] Skipped ProvideContext
...