air VS skaffold

To enable live reloading in Go we will checkout the command tool, Air - Live reload for Go apps.

☁️ Repositório do Air

This is made possible thanks to the Air tool, which now comes with every project you create. The configuration is as follows:

At a recent job, we had slightly different containers for local dev; our backend containers (for a Go app) had Air [1] installed for live reloading, plus Delve [2] running inside the container for VS Code's debugger to connect to. We also had a frontend container for local dev, which didn't get deployed as a container, just as static files.

[1] https://github.com/cosmtrek/air

[2] https://github.com/go-delve/delve/

Air is an automatic reloading tool for Go applications. It keeps an eye on code changes and automatically restarts the application, making development more efficient.

Just to add to the list there is also https://github.com/cosmtrek/air

Do you use anything for live reloading? This is one aspect I miss when using gomponents compared to go templates, where I had a setup using Browsersync, which immediately refreshed whenever html/css/js changed. Now, since all HTML is within Go code, I have to recompile my go program to see changes, which takes up to ~5sec (I use https://github.com/cosmtrek/air for this).

A nice middle ground is using a tool like Google's Skaffold, which provides "Bazel-like" capabilities for composing Docker images and tagging them based on a number of strategies, including file manifests. In my case, I also use build args to explicitly set versions of external dependencies.

While I am in a Typescript environment with this setup at the moment, my personal experience that Skaffold with Docker has a lighter implementation and maintenance overhead than Bazel. (You also get the added benefit of easy deployment and automatic rebuilds.)

I quite liked using Bazel in a small Golang monorepo, but I ran into pain when trying to do things like include third-party pre-compiled binaries in the Docker builds, because of the unusual build rules convention. The advantage of Skaffold is it provides a thin build/tag/deploy/verify layer over Docker and other container types. Might be worth a look!

Kudos to the Google team building it! https://skaffold.dev

To get a similar experience of preevy up, first we’ll need to split the build and deploy using process or alternatively employ tools that orchestrate build-tag-push-update-sync flow like Skaffold/Tilt.

We will be using docker and microk8s from Canonical. For running our software during development, we will be using skaffold which is a great tool developed by Google.

To add more context, if you are developing containers in a local dev environment, the minimum you should have is the Google Cloud SDK and Skaffold. The SDK will allow you to programmatically interact with Googleapis e.g. auth, services, resources. Skaffold will allow you to build and deploy to the cloud similar to working with a local dev environment.

I have used both Skaffold and Devspace. I prefer the latter.

I wonder if it has some overlap with https://skaffold.dev/.

K3d and Skaffold for local development

skaffold.dev - build in k8s - no more asking for the database password. All the plumbing to the backend is just done so it's easier for them to test and demo any branch