Develop locally

This page provides an overview of getting your development environment ready for building Reboot applications. Once your development environment is ready you can then start to define and implement your API.

Set up your environment

You can use one of Reboot's GitHub Codespaces or set up your environment manually by installing the prerequisites listed below.

Prerequisites

OS
Linux	x86_64 or arm64, glibc>=2.35 (Ubuntu Jammy and other equivalent-generation distributions)
macOS	arm64, macOS >= 14.0 and Xcode >= 15.2

• Python >= 3.10 and < 3.13 is required for Python backends, and fetched automatically for Node.js backends
• Node.js >= 20.10 is required for Node.js backends only
• Docker

note

Python 3.13 support is coming soon.

note

Your applications don't need to run "inside of" Docker, but Docker is used to host a service required for local development.

Directory layout

You can lay out your directories however you like, as long as you pass them correctly to rbt.

Here is a suggested file layout:

Files	Directory
*.proto	api/
Backend source *.py, *.ts/js	backend/src
Backend tests *.py, *.ts/js	backend/tests
Frontend	web

.rbtrc and flags

rbt loads its flags from an .rbtrc file, if present. This is a convenient way of keeping the options you have to type and remember to a minimum.

An .rbtrc file might look like:

Python

# Watch if any generated or source files are modified.
dev run --watch=backend/**/*.py

# Tell `rbt` that this is a Python application.
dev run --python

# Save state between chaos restarts.
dev run --name=bank

# Run the application!
dev run --application=backend/src/main.py

# When expunging, expunge that state we've saved.
dev expunge --name=bank

TypeScript

# Set the name of our application.
dev run --name=counter

# Declare that this is a nodejs application.
dev run --nodejs

# And specify where our application entrypoint is.
dev run --application=backend/src/main.ts

note

Note that for Node.js, transpilation of TypeScript will automatically be executed if the --application has a .ts extension, but can also be executed via --transpile=... or can be left to you and your favorite tools.

If your --application has a .js extension, you'll likely want to watch the files in dist/ rather than backend/src so that rbt will only restart your app when they have been correctly transpiled.

Syntax

Global options

Global options like the --state-directory flag can be specified in .rbtrc by prefixing with ...:

... --state-directory=non/default

Passthrough options

Commands like generate use the -- separator to accept arguments to pass directly to an underlying tool:

In a terminal:

rbt generate --python=backend/api/ api/ -- --mypy_out=backend/api/

In .rbtrc:

# Find '.proto' files in 'api/'.
generate api/

# Generate 'python' code from our '.proto' files in 'backend/api/'.
generate --python=backend/api/

# Generate 'mypy' code from our '.proto' files in 'backend/api/mypy/'.
generate -- --mypy_out=backend/api/mypy/

In these examples, the order of the flags is crucial. All flags that appear after -- are passed directly to generate.

Running your app for development

Once you've set up your environment as outlined above, all you'll need to run to start live developing your app is:

$ rbt dev run
...

Or if you're building a Node.js backend with npm (after installing @reboot-dev/reboot):

$ npx rbt dev run
...

Inspecting state

While doing local development you can inspect your application state by pointing your browser at http://localhost:9991/__/inspect (assuming you aren't using TLS and haven't changed the default port from 9991).

Persisting state during development

By default your application state will not be persisted across restarts. To persist state, you can pass a --name=... flag to rbt dev run.

When state is persisted, backwards incompatible changes in your .proto files are detected, and will trigger errors to encourage resolving them before they reach production. The --on-backwards-incompatibility flag allows you to control what happens when backwards incompatibility is encountered:

• ask: (default) Asks whether you would like to expunge the stored state to ignore the backwards incompatibility.
• expunge: Automatically expunges stored state after rendering a backwards compatibility error.
• fail: Waits for a code change that resolves the backwards incompatibility.

During early development of your application, either ask or expunge are reasonable choices. Once you have deployed to production, the fail option can encourage more caution while adjusting schemas.

You can also use rbt dev expunge --name=... to manually expunge data (where --name=... is the same value you're using for rbt dev run).