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User Story 4 - Getting Started

Status: Done

This is the story of Monada Sprint 4. It is told from the perspective of Mona Lisa, a 28-year-old programmer who works at a successful startup in San Francisco. Mona is the lead engineer at the backend team of her company. She loves her job and is very passionate about software and technology. She believes in the power of the cloud and open-source. She heard about Monada from a friend and registered to the beta program. She is excited to try it out and see how it can help her and her team.

Damn, I am so excited! Just got an email telling me that I was invited to join beta program for Monada. Can't wait to see what these guys are up to! The email links to https://github.com/monadahq/winglang, so I jump right in and this is what I see...

The Wing Programming Language

Wing is currently in private beta and can only be used by invited users. Please avoid sharing any information about Wing with anyone outside of the beta program.

Welcome!​

Wing is the first cloud oriented programming language. It is a statically typed, compiled language that allows developers to describe both the infrastructure and the behavior of their cloud applications within a single codebase.

Wing allows developers to leverage the cloud naturally within their code without having to understand the underlying infrastructure. Wing is designed to be a general-purpose language that can be used to build any type of cloud application.

The Wing compiler can target multiple cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes. It can also target a local cloud simulator, allowing developers to run their applications locally for testing and debugging using the Wing Console.

This README is for users of the language. It contains information about how to install the toolchain, and how to build Wing applications. If you wish to contribute to the project, please jump over to our contribution guide.

Getting Started​

Prerequisites​

To install Wing, you will need the following installed on your system:

  1. Node.js (version 16.x or above).
  2. VSCode is our supported IDE.

In order to deploy the "Hello, World" example below to AWS, you will also need:

  1. AWS CLI is only needed to configure local credentials.
  2. Terraform is needed to deploy to the cloud.

Authenticate to GitHub Packages​

Since Wing is currently in private beta and distributed through a Monada's private npm registry, you will need to login to the registry before installing:

$ npm login --scope=@monadahq --registry=https://npm.pkg.github.com
Username: GITHUB USERNAME
Password: YOUR PERSONAL ACCESS TOKEN
Email: PUBLIC-EMAIL-ADDRESS

To generate a token go to your GitHub account and select Developer settings > Personal access tokens > Generate new token. Make sure to include permissions for the read:packages scope (see docs).

AWS Account and Credentials​

To deploy Wing applications to the AWS Cloud, you'll need an AWS account and AWS credentials configured on your system.

Installation​

Now you should be able to install the Wing CLI:

npm install -g @monadahq/wing

Next, install the Wing Extension for VSCode:

TBD

And last but not least, install the Wing Console:

TBD

Hello, Wing!​

OK, we are ready to write our first Wing program!

Create a new file called hello.w with the following code:

bring cloud;

let queue = new cloud.Queue();

queue.add_consumer(inflight (message) => {
  log("Hello, ${message}!");
});

Now, let's test our program:

$ wing run hello.w
Compiling to target "sim"...
Starting Wing Console...

The Wing Console app will start and in the main view you'll see two resources: a Queue and a Function. You'll also notice that the function is connected to the queue through the message event.

Now, right-click on the queue and choose Push Message. Type world and hit Send.

You'll notice that the log window shows a few events and then prints your Hello, world! log. Congratulations! You have just written and tested your first Wing program!

As you can see, so far we've tested our program locally using the simulator and Wing Console. Next we'll see how you can deploy your program to AWS using Terraform.

Currently, our SDKs only support AWS, but the Wing compiler can target multiple cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes. We are working on adding support for other cloud providers.

First, we need to compile our program to AWS:

$ wing build --target tf-aws hello.w
Build for target "tf-aws"...

Now, let's deploy our program to AWS:

You will need to have AWS credentials configured on your system. See here for more information.

$ cd ./target/tf-aws
$ export AWS_REGION=us-east-1 # or any other region
$ terraform init
$ terraform apply

Now, if you open the Amazon SQS Console, select your AWS region, and you should be able to see that you have a queue there. Click Send and receive messages, in the Message Body box type cloud and hit Send message.

Now, jump over to the CloudWatch Console and under Log groups you should see a log group called /aws/lambda/.... Click on it and you should see the log message Hello, cloud!.

Learning more​

Now that you've written your first Wing program, what's next? Here are some resources to help you get started:

Staying up to date​

The entire Wing toolchain is continuously released. We follow semantic versioning and release notes are available in the Releases pages on GitHub.

To update the toolchain to the latest, run the following command:

$ npm update -g @monadahq/wing

Our VSCode extension has automatic updates, as well as the Wing Console.

Contributing​

We welcome and celebrate contributions from the community! Please see our contribution guide for more information about setting up a development environment, what we are working on, where we need help and other guidelines for contributing to the project.

Community​

We all hang out at the Wing Discord. Come as you are, say hi, ask questions, help friends, geek out!

License​

TBD

Notes​

The primary goal of sprint 4 is to allow us to start inviting external folks to join our private beta as users and contributors to the project.

As such, our focus for this sprint is:

  • Consolidate everything related to Wing into the monadahq/winglang GitHub repo. This includes:
  • Updating the main README file to match this RFC as close as possible.
  • Update CONTRIBUTING.md to provide step-by-step instructions on how to setup a development environment, compile the toolchain, etc.
  • Set up the workflows required for continuous releases - every commit to main should result in a full release, with the appropriate version bump (based on conventional commits), release notes in GitHub and artifacts pushed to the relevant repositories.
  • Make sure docs/wingsdk-api.md is generated (basically it's projen's API.md of the Wing SDK).
  • Continuous release of Wing Console (from its own repository), separate version line.
  • Since we require node.js installed on your system, there is currently no immediate need to bundle the node runtime into the compiler.