Running the Server Locally

Gofer is deployed as a single static binary allowing you to run the full service locally so you can play with the internals before committing resources to it. Spinning Gofer up locally is also a great way to debug "what would happen if?" questions that might come up during the creation of pipeline config files.

Install Gofer

Install Docker

The way in which Gofer runs containers is called a Scheduler. When deploying Gofer at scale we can deploy it with a more serious container scheduler (Nomad, Kubernetes) but for now we're just going to use the default local docker scheduler included. This simply uses your local instance of docker instance to run containers.

But before we use your local docker service... you have to have one in the first place. If you don't have docker installed, the installation is quick. Rather than covering the specifics here you can instead find a guide on how to install docker for your operating system on its documentation site.

Gofer talks to Docker as the user you run it as, so make sure that user can run containers. docker ps working without sudo is a good sign; on Linux that usually means being in the docker group.

Start the server

By default the Gofer binary is able to run the server in development mode. Simply start the service by:

gofer service start

The server runs in the foreground and prints its logs, so leave it running and use a second terminal for the rest of this guide.

To check that it's up, open http://localhost:8080 in your browser to see Gofer's web UI. The CLI is already set up to talk to a local server, so gofer pipeline list should work too (it'll be empty for now).

What development mode means

With no configuration, Gofer starts with settings meant for trying it out on your own machine:

• Authentication is off. Anyone who can reach port 8080 can do anything, so don't run it like this on a shared machine or network.
• Everything is stored in /tmp. Your pipelines, runs, secrets, and objects are lost when your machine restarts.
• Secrets use a placeholder encryption key that's the same for every development install.

That's all fine for following this guide. When you're ready to run Gofer for real, the server configuration page covers turning these off.