Kevin - Configuration Manager

Do you like configuring stuff? - of course no!

Do you like changing the stuff you configured? - Hell no!

Do you like playing detective and understand which value belong to what environment? - maybe...

Kevin to the rescue

Kevin provides a unified framework gto handle the configuration for all the environments at one place.

Do you need another environment? No problem, with Kevin you can create a configuration for your specific environment in few clicks. And ... as abonus, you can inherit all configuration parameters of a different environment and chnage only the parameters you need!.

Getting started

• Install Kevin core:

npm i @kevin-infra/core

• Connect to a repository Kevin use a Repository in order to store the configuration informations, and a Provider for communication with the repository. To connect Kevin to a certain repository, simply create a provider, and provide it while initialiing KevinService:

import Redis from 'ioredis';
import { RedisProvider } from '@kevin-infra/redis';
import { KevinService } from '@kevin-infra/core/services';

const provider = new RedisProvider( new Redis(
        'redis://localhost:6379'
      ));
      
const kevinService = new KevinService(provider);

Managing Environments

Environment is a collection of keys used by a certain deploymnet (Dev, Prod, QA, Staging etc').

Environments are managed in Kevin in a tree stracture, for example:

-Root
-- Prod
-- Dev
--- Staging
--- QA

In the above example:

• Prod and Dev will inherit all the keys of the Root environment
• Staging and QA will inhterit all the keys of the Dev environment.

Each environment can override the values of the parent environment and provide a unique value for the environment.

Create the root environment

First we need to initialize the root environment:

const rootEnviroment = await createRootEnvironment();

The rootEnvironment contains the information of the created environment:

• name: The name of the environment.
• id: the id of the enviroment:
• parentEnviroment: Information about the parent env (null for the root environment).

Create a sub environment

To create a sun environment under root (or any other environment), run the following code:

const newEnvironmentInfo = await this.kevinService.createEnvironment(
      "my-new-env-name",
      PARENT_ENVIRONMENT_ID
    );

Managing Keys

Getting all environments keys

await kevinService.setCurrentEnvironment(ENVIRONMENT_ID) // Setting kevin to work against specific environment.

const kevinKeys: Array<IKevinValue> =  await kevinService.getEnvironmentData();

Getting value for a specifc key

await kevinService.setCurrentEnvironment(ENVIRONMENT_ID) // Setting kevin to work against specific environment.

const value: IKevinValue =  await kevinService.getValue("my-key");

Setting a value

await kevinService.setCurrentEnvironment(ENVIRONMENT_ID) // Setting kevin to work against specific environment.

const value: IKevinValue =  await kevinService.setValue("my-key", "my-value");

Adding a new key.

await kevinService.setCurrentEnvironment(ENVIRONMENT_ID) // Setting kevin to work against specific environment.

const value: IKevinValue =  await kevinService.addKey("my-key", "my-value", "default-value");

The default-value is an optional default value that can be passed in order to set a value at the root environment.

If no value was provided, the key in the root environment will be set with an empty string.

How to spin up Kevin website on docker

Instead of taking the source code of the server and client and publish the website on your own, you can use the up to date docker image to do so.

How do you do that?

Steps

• Create a new Dockerfile.
• Copy & Paste the following template:

FROM tkul6/kevin-redis-provider:latest

ENV PROVIDER_TYPE '<PROVIDER_TYPE>'

EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["node", "kevin.server/dist/index.js"]

• Select the desired provider type (supported providers are listed below).
• Add additional ENV params specific to the provider you selected.
• Create the image and use it!

Supported Providers:

Provider	Env value	Additional Parameters
Redis	provider.type.redis	REDIS_PROVIDER_URL - The url to the reids server (ENV param

Example

For Kevin server with Redis provider initialized that points to redis://my-reids-server:6389 The docker file should look like this:

FROM tkul6/kevin-redis-provider:latest

ENV PROVIDER_TYPE 'provider.type.redis'
ENV REDIS_PROVIDER_URL 'redis://my-reids-server:6389'

EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["node", "kevin.server/dist/index.js"]

More Information

• Providers.
• Kevin Website.