Command Line

When running vagga, it finds the vagga.yaml file in current working directory or any of its parents and uses that as a project root directory (alternative files are supported too, see below).

When running vagga without arguments it displays a short summary of which commands are defined by vagga.yaml, like this:

$ vagga
Available commands:
    run                 Run mysample project
    build-docs          Build documentation using sphinx

Refer to Commands for more information of how to define commands for vagga.

There are also builtin commands. All builtin commands start with underscore _ character to be clearly distinguished from user-defined commands.

Full list of files that mark directory as vagga’s project:

  1. vagga.yaml primary and preferred one
  2. .vagga/vagga.yaml as an alternative to vagga.yaml (useful if you don’t want to commit it to a git)
  3. vagga.local.yaml or .vagga.local.yaml or .vagga/local.yaml which contain additional mixins also mark project directory even if no vagga.yaml is present (since vagga 0.8.1)

Multiple Commands

Since vagga 0.6 there is a way to run multiple commands at once:

$ vagga -m cmd1 cmd2

This is similar to running:

$ vagga cmd1 && vagga cmd2

But there is one key difference: containers needed to run all the commands are built beforehand. This has two consequences:

  1. When containers need to be rebuilt, they are rebuilt first, then you see the output of both commands in sequence (no container build log in-between)
  2. If container for command 2 depends on side-effects of running command 1 (i.e. container contains a binary built by command 1), you will get wrong results. In that case you should rely on shell to do the work (for example in the repository of vagga itself vagga -m make test is not the right way, the right is vagga make && vagga test)

Obviously you can’t pass any arguments to either of commands when running vagga -m, this is also the biggest reason of why you can’t run built-in commands (those starting with underscore) using the option. But you can use global options, and they influence all the commands, for example:

$ vagga --environ DISPLAY:0 -m clean_profile run_firefox

Builtin Commands

All commands have --help, so we don’t duplicate all command-line flags here

vagga _run CONTAINER CMD ARG…
run arbitrary command in container defined in vagga.yaml
vagga _build CONTAINER

Builds container without running a command.

More useful in the form:

$ vagga _build --force container_name

To rebuild a container that has previously been built.

vagga _clean

Removes images and temporary files created by vagga.

The following command removes containers that are not used by current vagga config (considering the state of all files that vagga.yaml depends on):

$ vagga _clean --unused

Another for removes containers which were not uses for some time:

$ vagga _clean --unused --at-least 10days

This is faster as it only checks timestamps of the containers. Each time any command in a container is run, we update timestamp. This is generally more useful than bare --unused, because it allows to keep multiple versions of same container, which means you can switch between branches rapidly.

There an old and deprecated option for removing unused containers:

$ vagga _clean --old

This is different because it only looks at symlinks in .vagga/*. So may be wrong (if you changed vagga.yaml and did not run the command(s)). It’s faster because it doesn’t calculate the hashsums. But the difference in speed usually not larger than a few seconds (on large configs). The existence of the two commands should probably be treated as a historical accident and --unused variant preferred.

For other operations and parameters see vagga _clean --help

vagga _list
List of commands (similar to running vagga without command)
vagga _version_hash CONTAINER

Prints version hash for the container. In case the image has not been built (or config has been updated since) it should return new hash. But sometimes it’s not possible to determine the hash in advance. In this case command returns an error.

Might be used in some automation scripts.

vagga _init_storage_dir

Deprecated. Use storage-subdir-from-env-var instead.

If you have configured a storage-dir in settings, say /vagga-storage, when you run vagga _init_storage_dir abc will create a /vagga-storage/abc and .vagga with .vagga/.lnk pointing to the directory. The command ensures that the storage dir is not used for any other folder (unless --allow-multiple is specified).

This is created for buildbots which tend to clean .vagga directory on every build (like gitlab-ci) or just very often.

Since vagga 0.6 there is --allow-multiple flag, that allows to keep shared subdirectory for multiple source directories. This is useful for CI systems which use different build directories for different builds.

Warning

While simultanenous builds of different source directories, with the same subdirectory should work most of the time, this functionality still considered exerimental and may have some edge cases.

vagga _pack_image IMAGE_NAME

Pack image into the tar archive, optionally compressing and output it into stdout (use shell redirection > file.tar to store it into the file).

It’s very similar to tar -cC .vagga/IMAGE_NAME/root except it deals with file owners and permissions correctly. And similar to running vagga _run IMAGE_NAME tar -c / except it ignores mounted file systems.

vagga _push_image IMAGE_NAME

Push container image IMAGE_NAME into the image cache.

Actually it boils down to packing an image into tar (vagga _pack_image) and running push-image-script, see the documentation of the setting to find out how to configure image cache.

vagga _base_dir
Displays (writes to stdout) directory where active vagga.yaml is.
vagga _relative_work_dir

Displays (writes to stdout) current working directory relative to the base directory. Basically, this means that $(vagga _base_dir)/$(vagga _relative_work_dir) is current working directory.

When current working directory contains vagga.yaml this command returns empty string (output still contains a newline), not a single dot, as one may expect.

Normal Commands

If command declared as !Command you get a command with the following usage:

Usage:
    vagga [OPTIONS] some_command [ARGS ...]

Runs a command in container, optionally builds container if that does not
exists or outdated. Run `vagga` without arguments to see the list of
commands.

positional arguments:
  some_command          Your defined command
  args                  Arguments for the command

optional arguments:
  -h,--help             show this help message and exit
  -E,--env,--environ NAME=VALUE
                        Set environment variable for running command
  -e,--use-env VAR      Propagate variable VAR into command environment
  --no-build            Do not build container even if it is out of date.
                        Return error code 29 if it's out of date.
  --no-version-check    Do not run versioning code, just pick whatever
                        container version with the name was run last (or
                        actually whatever is symlinked under
                        `.vagga/container_name`). Implies `--no-build`

All the ARGS that follow command are passed to the command even if they start with dash -.

Supervise Commands

If command declared as !Supervise you get a command with the following usage:

Usage:
    vagga run [OPTIONS]

Run full server stack

optional arguments:
  -h,--help             show this help message and exit
  --only PROCESS_NAME [...]
                        Only run specified processes
  --exclude PROCESS_NAME [...]
                        Don't run specified processes
  --no-build            Do not build container even if it is out of date.
                        Return error code 29 if it's out of date.
  --no-version-check    Do not run versioning code, just pick whatever
                        container version with the name was run last (or
                        actually whatever is symlinked under
                        `.vagga/container_name`). Implies `--no-build`

Currently there is no way to provide additional arguments to commands declared with !Supervise.

The --only and --exclude arguments are useful for isolating some single app to a separate console. For example, if you have vagga run that runs full application stack including a database, cache, web-server and your little django application, you might do the following:

$ vagga run --exclude django

Then in another console:

$ vagga run --only django

Now you have just a django app that you can observe logs from and restart independently of other applications.