»Creating an Example Application

Video tutorial below:

Create a new folder called example_app in your $HOME folder; there is no restriction on the location of Waypoint apps, $HOME is just used for the guide.

$ mkdir $HOME/example_app

If you look at the following example configuration, you will see that the use block for the build has a value gobuilder, which is the plugin's name to be loaded for the build component. Waypoint defines the convention that plugins are always called waypoint-plugin-<name>. When you run the waypoint build command, Waypoint will search the known plugin folders for a file called waypoint-plugin-gobuilder it will then use that plugin for the build component.

The configuration also has the values app for the output_name and the source as ./, we can put our Go application in the same location as the plugin config. First, create a file waypoint.hcl in the folder $HOME/example_app/ with the following contents.

project = "guides"

app "example" {

  build {
    use "gobuilder" {
      output_name = "app"
      source = "./"
    }
  }

  deploy {
    use "gobuilder" {}
  }
}

Now you can create the source for the example application, let's make the most simple Go application possible. Create a new file main.go in your Waypoint application folder and copy the following to it.

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
  fmt.Println("Hello Waypoint")
}

You should now have two files in your application folder waypoint.hcl and main.go, let's test your new plugin.

Next - Testing the Plugin