EdgeX Foundry Core Snap

This project contains snap packaging for the EgdeX Foundry reference implementation micros services.

This is an early experiment, and as such, there are quite a few limitations and manual steps involved.

The snap contains all of the EdgeX core micro services, export services, support service, and the device-virtual service. There currently are two versions available in the snap store, one based on the 'Barcelona' release, and one based on the current 'California' development release.

Installation Requirements

The snap can be installed on any system running snapd, however for full confinement, the snap must be installed on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or later Desktop or Server, or a system running Ubuntu Core 16.

Installation

There are amd64 and arm64 versions of both releases available in the store. You can see the revisions available for your machine's architecture by running the command:

$ snap info edgexfoundry-core

Barcelona

The Barcelona based snap can be installed with:

$ sudo snap install edgexfoundry-core --edge

California

The California based snap can be installed with:

$ sudo snap install edgexfoundry-core --channel=cali/edge

Note - this snap has only been tested on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop/Server and Ubuntu Core 16.

WARNING - as this snap is still considered experimental, please don't install it on a machine that you can't live without. Use a VM or cloud server instance, or a spare desktop/server.

Configuration

The hardware-observe, process-control, and system-observe interfaces needs to be connected after installation using the following commands:

$ snap connect edgexfoundry-core:hardware-observe core:hardware-observe

$ snap connect edgexfoundry-core:process-control core:process-control

$ snap connect edgexfoundry-core:system-observe core:system-observe

Starting/Stopping EdgeX

To start all the EdgeX microservices, use the following command:

$ edgexfoundry-core.start-edgex

To stop all the EdgeX microservices, use the following command:

$ edgexfoundry-core.stop-edgex

WARNING - don't start the EdgeX snap on a system which is already running mongoDB or Consul.

Enabling/Disabling service startup

It's possible to a effect which services are started by the start-edgex script by editing a file called edgex-services-env which can be found in the /var/snap/edgex-core-snap/current ($SNAP_DATA).

Note - this file is created by the start-edgex script, so the script needs to be run at least once to copy the default version into place.

Limitations

Barcelona

• the Barcelona snap is large (~590M), however it only includes a single JRE, shared by all services.

• none of the services are actually defined as such in snapcraft.yaml, instead shell-scripts are used to start and stop the EdgeX microservices and dependent services such as consul and mongo.

• the start script will fail on a sytem which has more than one local IP address, or active bridge network devices as the current consul start command doesn't specify a specific IP address for the agent.

California

• the California snap is much smaller (~400MB)

• some of the new Go-based core services (export-*) currently don't load configuration from Consul

• the new Go-based export services don't generate log files, and export-client has a broken health check

Building

This snap can be built on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS system:

• install snapcraft
• clone this git repo
• cd edgex-core-snap
• snapcraft

This should produce a binary snap package called edgex-core-snap__.snap.