What is a manifest file?

Introduction to manifest files and their purpose

What is a manifest file?

A manifest files allows you to be more explicit about your application composition and control settings that are not usually available through the user interface or Cloud 66 toolbelt. The file describes the setup of the components that make up your application.

These are just some examples of the settings you can control with a manifest file:

Defining sizes and data center region for your servers
Installing extra packages
Specifying the version of a component
Configuring application components to share a server
Customizing component-specific configurations

How do I use a manifest file?

Manifest settings are defined in a file called manifest.yml. For Rails/Rack applications the path for manifest.yml is:

<application-root>/.cloud66/manifest.yml

To get started:

Add this file to your code
Populate it with appropriate values (see below for examples)
Commit your changes to your repository
Build your application

Take care when editing

Be cautious when editing the manifest file for any application particularly if it is running in a production environment. A single stray character or space can cause the application to fail to deploy or to deploy in a degraded state.

Is your yaml valid?

The manifest file is YAML formatted. You can check its validity at YAML Validator or with this command: $ ruby -e "require 'yaml'; YAML.load_file('.cloud66/manifest.yml')"