realm-app-importer

Realm App Importer

Imports an app directory into MongoDB Realm (formerly known as Stitch).

This CLI works around a few shortcomings of the official Realm CLI - most notably around import of apps referencing secrets and the fact that the CLI updates apps (leaving upstages changes to app directories, degrading developer experience).

The CLI provides two commands:

• import (the default command): Called to import a single app: The server creates an app id based on the apps name. This command also help you to inject this id into other tools by either saving it to a file or serving it over HTTP.
• serve: Start an HTTP server allowing other processes (such as an integration test suite) to import apps on demand, without having to provide credentials or have direct file-system access to the app template directories.

Importing an app

If you don't have an app to import, read the section on "exporting" below.

Ensure you have this CLI installed in your project as a dev-dependency.

npm install realm-app-importer --save-dev

When you have a templated app that you want to download (stored in ./my-app-template for example), run

npx realm-app-importer ./my-app-template

To import secrets add a secrets.json to the template directory, containing a single JSON object with keys and string values:

{
	"my-secret": "v3ry-s3cr3t"
}

Runtime options

realm-app-importer <template-path>

Import a Realm App

Commands:
  realm-app-importer import                 Import a Realm App
  <template-path>                                                      [default]
  realm-app-importer serve                  Start serving an HTTP server capable
  <template-path..>                         of importing apps

Positionals:
  template-path  Path of the application directory to import            [string]

Options:
  --version              Show version number                           [boolean]
  --help                 Show help                                     [boolean]
  --base-url             Base url of the stitch server to import the app into
                                     [string] [default: "http://localhost:9090"]
  --username             Username of an administrative user
                                    [string] [default: "[e-mail]"]
  --password             Password of an administrative user
                                                  [string] [default: "password"]
  --config               Path for the realm-cli configuration to temporarily
                         store credentials    [string] [default: "realm-config"]
  --apps-directory-path  Path to temporarily copy the app while importing it
                                             [string] [default: "imported-apps"]
  --app-id-path          Saves the app id to a file at this path        [string]
  --app-id-port          Starts up an HTTP server and serves the app id [number]
  --clean-up             Should the tool delete temporary files when exiting?
                                                       [boolean] [default: true]

Besides the <template-path> the CLI takes a few optional runtime parameters, most of which should be self-explainatory and set to defaults that should ease the usecase of integration tests against local deployments.

When using the import command, a consuming integration test can to get a hold of the id of the app, in a couple of ways:

• the consuming test harness can use the package programmatically, instantiating the AppImporter class and calling its importApp method, which returns a Promise<{ appId: string }>.
• the --app-id-path runtime option saves the app id to a file, which can be read by the test harness.
• the --app-id-port runtime option starts up a web-server on the specified port and serves the app id as a text response.

Exporting an app

Ensure you have the official Stitch CLI installed in your project as a dev-dependency,

npm install mongodb-realm-cli --save-dev

Log into the official Stitch CLI:

npx realm-cli login --api-key <your-api-key> --private-api-key <your-private-api-key>

Export a Stitch app that you want to import later

npx realm-cli export --output ./my-app-template --as-template --app-id <your-app-id>

Where <your-app-id> is replaced with the app id found in the UI.

We're using the --as-template flag to ask the CLI to not store any ids into the exported files.

You might also need to specify a --project-id (equivalent with as group-id) in which the app was originally created.

See the Realm CLI documentation for more information.