cf-postgres-tinsmith

PostgreSQL Tinsmith

A tinsmith, in Blacksmith Services parlance, is a Cloud Foundry Service Broker that runs as a Cloud Foundry Application, consumes a provisioned, on-demand Blacksmith Service, and makes it available to the rest of the world as a shared, multi-tenant service.

A picture may make things clearer:

This Tinsmith, in particular, takes a dedicated PostgreSQL instance (most likely deployed via the PostgreSQL Blacksmith Forge) and carves up the dedicated host / cluster into individual databases for each service. Bound applications will have free run of their own database, but will be unable to interact with other shared databases on the same installation.

Deploying

To deploy this Tinsmith, you need the code, a Cloud Foundry, and a PostgreSQL service from your CF Marketplace. We heartily recommend a service deployed via the Blacksmith and its PostgreSQL Forge, but any service that provides the following information in its $VCAP_SERVICES credentials block should do:

• host
• port (as a number)
• username
• password
• db_name or name or database

To deploy and start the Tinsmith application:

git clone https://github.com/blacksmith-community/cf-postgres-tinsmith
cd cf-postgres-tinsmith

# push the code for tinsmith
cf push --no-start

# bind your database service to tinsmith
cf bind-service postgres-tinsmith YOUR-DATABASE-SERVICE

# tag your database service so that tinsmith can find it
# See "Configuration" below
cf update-service YOUR-DATABASE-SERVICE -t "postgresql"

# you may want to set some other environment variables at
# this stage; see "Configuration", below.
cf set-env postgres-tinsmith SB_BROKER_USERNAME my-broker
cf set-env postgres-tinsmith SB_BROKER_PASSWORD a-secret

# start the app
cf start postgres-tinsmith

Then, create the Tinsmith service broker and enable the service. If you have the administrator role:

cf create-service-broker postgres-tinsmith my-broker a-secret \
  https://postgres-tinsmith.$APP_DOMAIN

# enable the service
cf enable-service-access postgres

If you only have the space developer role:

# make sure to target your space
cf target -s <SPACE>

cf create-service-broker postgres-tinsmith my-broker a-secret \
  https://postgres-tinsmith.$APP_DOMAIN --space-scoped

Lastly, verify that the service appears in the marketplace:

cf marketplace

Configuring

This tinsmith is configured entirely through environment variables.

There are environment variables for governing the presentation of this brokers service / plan in the marketplace:

• SERVICE_ID - The internal ID of the service that this broker provides to the marketplace.
• SERVICE_NAME - The CLI-friendly name of the service.
• PLAN_ID - The internal ID of the plan that this broker provides to the marketplace.
• DESCRIPTION - A human-friendly description of the service / plan, to be displayed in the marketplace
• TAGS - A comma-separated list of tags to apply to instances of the service.

There are environment variables for controlling the security and authentication parameters of the broker:

• SB_BROKER_USERNAME - The HTTP Basic Auth username that must be used to access this broker. Defaults to b-postgres.
• SB_BROKER_PASSWORD - The HTTP Basic Auth password that must be used to access this broker. Defaults to postgres.

You can also override the service selection logic and force it to pick a specific, named service by setting the USE_SERVICE environment variable to its name. Otherwise, the broker will look for bound services that are tagged postgres or postgresql.