Administrative processes

Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes.

• As the process formation facilitates normal operation, engineers often need to do one-off administrative maintenance:
  • Database migrations.
  • Getting a console to the app to inspect its state or mutate data.
  • Running one-time maintenance scripts.
• These processes should run in an identical environment to long-running processes of the app.
  • Against a release, using the same Codebase and Configuration.
  • Admin code must ship with application code.
• Dependency isolation should be used on all process types.
  • Java:
    • Use a consistent classpath
  • Javascript:
    • p.r.comp.lang.javascript.util.build.npm (Private) exec
  • p.r.comp.lang.php (Private):
    • Use the same p.r.comp.lang.php.util.build.compose (Private) autoloader
  • p.r.comp.lang.python (Private):
    • Use the same p.r.comp.lang.python.util.build.virtualenv (Private)
  • p.r.comp.lang.ruby (Private):
    • Use p.r.comp.lang.ruby.util.build.bundler (Private) exec
  • p.r.comp.lang.rust (Private):
    • Statically-linked, baby
• Favour languages with a REPL that make it easy to run one-off scripts:
  • Locally, by directly kicking off processes in the checkout using shell commands.
  • In production, via remote access software like SSH or SaltStack.

References

• XII. Admin processes

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Backlinks

• The Twelve-Factor App (public)