Problem Description

The Preevy profile is currently two things:

• A persistent state which can be saved either locally or remotely. Contains the tunneling key, default flags and driver data.
• A map of references to the persistent states ("context"), which is always saved locally. Maps a local name to the location of the persistent state.

Managing the two using a single set of CRUD actions is confusing. Specifically:

Prior art

Docker CLI

Docker CLI has multiple contexts stored locally, and no state. Context is only editable using the CLI context commands. All CRUD operations on the context are supported in addition to import/export in blob format.

Usage: docker context COMMAND Manage contexts Commands: create Create a context export Export a context to a tar archive FILE or a tar stream on STDOUT. import Import a context from a tar or zip file inspect Display detailed information on one or more contexts ls List contexts rm Remove one or more contexts show Print the name of the current context update Update a context use Set the current docker context 

kubectl

Similarly to Docker CLI, kubectl has multiple contexts and no state. Contexts are stored in the kubeconfig file and are editable both using the CLI and directly by editing the file. Multiple kubeconfig files are allowed, with merging logic.

Examples: (source)

kubectl config view kubectl config get-contexts # display list of contexts kubectl config current-context # display the current-context kubectl config use-context my-cluster-name # set the default context to my-cluster-name kubectl config set-cluster my-cluster-name # set a cluster entry in the kubeconfig kubectl config set-cluster my-cluster-name --proxy-url=my-proxy-url kubectl config set-credentials kubeuser/foo.kubernetes.com --username=kubeuser --password=kubepassword kubectl config set-context --current --namespace=ggckad-s2 kubectl config unset users.foo # delete user foo

Pulumi

Pulumi has a single context set locally via the login command (and unset via logout). The context references the state which can be stored on various backends (local, s3, gc, azblob, Pulumi Cloud).

Examples (source)

pulumi login # default Pulumi Cloud pulumi login https://api.pulumi.acmecorp.com # self hosted Pulumi pulumi login file://~ pulumi login s3://my-pulumi-state-bucket

There is no option to override the context on a specific command like in e.g, docker --context <context> ... or kubectl --context <context> ...

Suggested solutions

I suggest changing the preevy profile commands to only manage the state: tunneling key, default flags and driver data.

CRUD operations on the profile:

preevy profile create [url] [...args] # unspecified args will be prompted for preevy profile rm <url> preevy profile config view preevy profile config update [...args] preevy profile key preevy profile cp <src> <dest> preevy profile mv <src> <dest> # cp and rm

The reference to the profile can currently be expressed fully by the URL of the profile. There is no additional data (e.g, credentials or storage parameters).

We can support either a single context (a-la Pulumi), or a list of contexts similar to Docker CLI/kubectl and our existing features.

Option 1: Multiple contexts

This essentially allows referencing multiple profiles using local names.

Introduce a new entity "context" and a CLI topic preevy context:

preevy context add <name> <url> preevy context update <name> <url> preevy context rm <name> preevy context ls preevy context show preevy context use <name>

The profile creation command can have flags to also add a new context or set an existing context with the new profile:

preevy profile create [--set-context <name>] [url] [...args] 

Override context for a specific command

This is currently supported with the --profile global flag. We'll need to rename it to --context:

preevy up --context <name>

Convenience command init

preevy init -> preevy profile create --set-context default

Option 2: Single context

The main UX change here is dropping support for local names for the profile URLs.

Changing the current profile is done via the preevy profile use command:

preevy profile use <url> preevy profile current # shows the URL