Parameters
When you are authoring a bundle, you can define parameters that are required by
your bundle. These parameters are restricted to a list of allowable data
types and are used to define parameters such as
username and password values for a backing database, or the region that a
certain resource should be deployed in, etc. Then in your action’s steps you can
reference the parameters using porter’s template language {{ bundle.parameters.db_name }}.
Parameter values are resolved from a combination of supplied parameter set files, user-specified overrides and defaults defined by the bundle itself. The resolved values are added to a claim receipt, which is passed in to the bundle execution environment, e.g. the docker container, when the bundle action is executed (install/upgrade/uninstall/invoke).
Parameter Sets
A Parameter Set is a file which maps parameters to their strategies for value
resolution. Strategies include resolving from a source on the user’s machine
such as an environment variable (env), filepath (path), command result
(command) or simply the value itself (value). In addition, a parameter
can have a secret source (secret). See the secrets
plugin docs to learn how to configure Porter to use
an external secret store.
Parameter Sets are created using porter parameters generate. Afterwards a parameter set can be edited if changes are required. See porter parameters help for all available commands.
Now when you execute the bundle you can pass the name of the parameter set to
the command using the --parameter-set or -p flag, e.g.
porter install -p myparamset.
If you are creating parameter sets manually, you can use the Parameter Set Schema to validate that you have created it properly.
User-specified values
A user may also supply parameter values when invoking an action on the bundle.
User-supplied values take precedence over both the bundle defaults and any
included in a provided parameter set file. The CLI flag for supplying a
parameter override is --param.
For example, you may decide to override the db_name parameter for a given
installation via porter install --param db_name=mydb -p myparamset.
Bundle defaults
The bundle author may have decided to supply a default value for a given
parameter as well. This value would be used when neither a user-specified
value nor a parameter set value is supplied. See the Parameters section in
the Author Bundles doc for more info.
Q & A
Why can’t the parameter source be defined in porter.yaml?
See the helpful explanation in the credentials doc, which applies to parameter sources as well.