Getting started with manifest files

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. If you’re already familiar with manifest files, refer to Building a manifest file.

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

Is my yaml valid?

A working example

In this example we are going to modify the configuration of the simple application we used in our Getting started guide.

What you’ll need

Before you start, please check you have the following:

• A Cloud 66 Account — If you don’t already have one, sign up for a Cloud 66 account. You’ll get free unlimited access to all products for 4 weeks.
• Application code — Application code should be hosted in a (secure) publicly accessible git repository and pre-built images should be hosted in image publicly accessible repositories.
• A manifest file - Create a file named manifest.yml in a folder named .cloud66, that is in turn located in the root of your source code and checked into your repository.
• A Cloud account linked to Cloud 66 or your own servers set up — See below.

Setting up your first manifest file

To populate the manifest.yml for your application:

1. Follow the steps in the Getting Started guide but stop before the Defining your application step.
2. Add the YAML below to your manifest.yml file:

rails:
  configuration:
    ruby_version: 3.0

You’ll see that we’re defining several things in this YAML:

• The component type we are configuring (rails)
• The version of Ruby that will be installed as part of this component ( ruby_version)

Once we have the latest version of our Manifest checked in, we can go back to the Getting Started guide and continue from Defining your application step. Now, when you deploy your application, it will use the settings defined in your manifest file.

Defining a server for your component

The Manifest file gives you a lot of control over your components. For example, you can use the server settings to specify the exact size and region for your application server. The YAML below is an example of this in action:

rails:
  configuration:
    ruby_version: 3.0
  servers:
  - server:
      unique_name: master
      size: s-2vcpu-2gb
      region: lon1
      vendor: digitalocean
      key_name: My_DO_Account # the name of your cloud provider in your Cloud66 account

This would install your Rails server on Digital Ocean, at their London data centre and on a 2CPU and 2GB cloud server.

• You can find the available values for size and region in our API documentation.
• You can find the key_name for your cloud provider(s) listed on your Dashboard.

Caution

What’s next?

• Understand the structure of manifest files.
• Learn more about the power of manifest files with our detailed how-to guide.
• Learn how to use CustomConfig - a powerful tool for configuring the components of your application.

Need help with deployments?

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