Link Properties

(See Links for an introduction.)

Note

This feature is available with bosh-release v255.5+.

In addition to sharing basic networking information (name, AZ, IP, etc.) links allow to show arbitrary information via properties. Most common example is sharing a port value. From our previous example here is a web job that communicates with a database:

name: web

templates:
  config.erb: config/conf

consumes:
- name: primary_db
  type: db

provides:
- name: incoming
  type: http

properties: {...}

Here is an example Postgres job that provides a conn link of type db, and now also includes server's port for client connections:

name: postgres

templates: {...}

provides:
- name: conn
  type: db
  properties:
  - port
  - adapter
  - username
  - password
  - name

properties:
  port:
    description: "Port for Postgres to listen on"
    default: 5432
  adapter:
    description: "Type of this database"
    default: postgres
  username:
    description: "Username"
    default: postgres
  password:
    description: "Password"
  name:
    description: "Database name"
    default: postgres

Note that all properties included in the conn link are defined by the job itself in the properties section.

And finally web job can use the port and a few other properties in its ERB templates when configuring how to connect to the database:

<%=

db = link("primary_db")

result = {
  "production" => {
    "adapter" => db.p("adapter"),
    "username" => db.p("username"),
    "password" => db.p("password"),
    "host" => db.instances.first.address,
    "port" => db.p("port"),
    "database" => db.p("name"),
    "encoding" => "utf8",
    "reconnect" => false,
    "pool" => 5
  }
}

JSON.dump(result)

%>

Similarly to how p template accessor provides access to the job's top level properties, link("...").p("...) and link("...").if_p("...) accessors work with properties included in the link.

if_p template accessor becomes very useful when trying to provide backwards compatibility around link properties as their interface changes. For example if Postgres job author decides to start including encoding property in the link and web job's author wants to continue to support older links that don't include that information, they can use db.if_p("encoding") { ... }.

And finally in the above example the operator needs to configure database password to deploy these two jobs since password property doesn't have a default:

instance_groups:
- name: app
  jobs:
  - name: web
    release: my-app
    consumes:
      primary_db: {from: data_db}

- name: data_db
  jobs:
  - name: postgres
    release: postgres
    provides:
      conn: {as: data_db}
    properties:
      password: some-password

Note

There is a bosh issue with sharing of hash properties via Credhub.