Examine Bundles

Once a bundle has been built, how do users of the bundle figure out how to actually use it? A user could read the porter.yaml or the bundle.json if they have the bundle locally, but this won’t work for a bundle that has been published to an OCI registry. Even when you have them locally, the bundle.json and porter.yaml aren’t the best way to figure out how to use a bundle. How should a user examine the bundle then? Porter has a command called explain to help with this!

$ porter explain --reference jeremyrickard/porter-do-bundle:v1.0.0
Name: spring-music
Description: Run the Spring Music Service on Kubernetes and Digital Ocean PostgreSQL
Version: 1.0.0

Credentials:
Name               Description                                       Required
do_access_token    Access Token for Digital Ocean Account            true
do_spaces_key      DO Spaces API Key                                 true
do_spaces_secret   DO Spaces API Secret                              true
kubeconfig         Kube config file with permissions to deploy app   true

Parameters:
Name            Description                                                     Type      Default             Required   Applies To
database_name   Name of database to create                                      string    jrrportertest       false      All Actions
helm_release    Helm release name                                               string    spring-music-helm   false      All Actions
namespace       Namespace to install Spring Music app                           string    default             false      All Actions
node_count      Number of database nodes                                        integer   1                   false      All Actions
region          Region to create Database and DO Space                          string    nyc3                false      All Actions
space_name      Name for DO Space                                               string    jrrportertest       false      All Actions

Outputs:
Name         Description                                Type     Applies To
service_ip   IP Address assigned to the Load Balancer   string   install,upgrade

The porter explain command will show what credentials and parameters are required for the bundle, what outputs are generated, and what custom actions have been defined. For parameters, this command will also show you the default value, if one has been provided. Additionally, the user can quickly see what actions a parameter or output apply to.

porter explain can be used with a published bundle, as show above, or with a local bundle. The command even works with bundles that were not built with Porter, through the use of the --cnab-file flag. For all the options, run the command porter explain --help.

If you would like to see the invocation images and/or the images the bundle will use, see the inspect command.