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Microservices - Setting up PCF Dev for local development environment

In this tutorial we are going to learn how to setup PCF development environment in local desktop/laptop.

Why PCF

PCF is a multi-cloud commercial platform where customers can run enterprise applications. It provides continues delivery, security and customization of your products in cloud. So customers can focus on actualy application development and deployment. They don't need to bother much about preparing the infrastructure etc. For more details you may refer below link.
https://pivotal.io/why-pivotal

What is PCF Dev

PCF Dev is a distribution provided by Pivotal which allows developers to run the full featured cloud foundry so development and debugging becomes easier for the developer. If you create free developer account in PCF then you will get only 2 GB memory to run your applications there while for a microservice application it may not be enough. When you setup PCF dev on your machine you don't face such challenges and memory limits to your machine only.

Installation Steps

I have used MAC OS for this demo so my commands or packages will be specific to that but PCF dev supports Linux and Windows also.
Before starting the installation, we need to register with Pivotal to download the binaries from there which we will need to setup the PCF Dev. Below is the link to register at Pivotal.
Registration URL: https://account.run.pivotal.io/z/uaa/sign-up
Please note that it will need around 8 GB memory and around 100 GB of disk space to setup the PCF Dev.

CF CLI

PCF Dev uses the CLI tool for upload and run applications, so first of all we will install cf CLI which can be setup following below links provided by PCF.
Pivotal link to download CLI: https://cli.run.pivotal.io/stable?release=macosx64&source=github

Once you download the cli, you can install it by executing the package. If you need help then you can check section "Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface" at below link.
Pivotal link to setup CLI: https://docs.pivotal.io/pcf-dev/install-osx.html

Once it is installed you can verify it by executing the command "cf".
CF version check

PCF Dev installation

Follow below steps to install PCF Dev. While executing the cf commands, it requires administrator access to execute them and that's why I have used "sudo" with every command which will require your admin password.
1. First of all you need to download the binary of PCF Dev from below link. Please note that it is around 20 GB in size so make sure that you have enough internet bandwidth.
https://network.pivotal.io/products/pcfdev
At above link you will see similar to below screen. Please select the highlighted binary for MAC OS.
pcf dev downloads
2. Install the cf dev plugin which is required to run PCF Dev.
sudo cf install-plugin cfdev
If you see any error similar to as given below, then it means you already have cf plugin and you may need to remove it to proceed further.
Plugin cfdev v0.0.17 could not be installed as it contains commands with names that are already used: dev.
In this case you can execute below command to check the installed plugin.
sudo cf plugins
You may see below output. Just to mention that pivotal has deprecated the pcfdev plugin and it need to be uninstalled so we can install the cfdev.
plugin   version   command name   command help
pcfdev   0.30.2    dev, pcfdev    Control PCF Dev VMs running on your workstation
Now we need to remove the "pcfdev" plugin by executing below command. Once it removes the existing plugin, we can re-execute the command to install the cf dev plugin. 
sudo cf uninstall-plugin pcfdev
3. Now start the PCF Dev using below command. We need to provide the downloaded binary location  from step-1 in below command as "pcf-dev-binary".
Syntax: sudo cf dev start -f <pcf-dev-binary>
Example: sudo cf dev start -f /Users/Downloads/pcfdev-v1.2.0-darwin.tgz
4. To stop the PCF dev execute below command.
sudo cf dev stop

Other posts you may like:

Microservice tutorial using Spring boot

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Comments

  1. DevOps11 January 2020 at 16:31

    The information which you have provided in this blog is really useful to everyone. Thanks for sharing.
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    ReplyDelete
  2. svrtechnologies21 February 2020 at 15:58

    I am inspired with your post writing style & how continuously you describe this topic. After reading your post pivotal tutorial , thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I feel happy about it and I love learning more about this topic. pivotal cloud foundry tutorial

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Techno Journals22 February 2020 at 09:53

      Thanks for your kind word. I am very happy to know that you found it helpful.

      Delete
  3. N-Technologies1 March 2020 at 08:35

    Are the deployed application and settings destroyed after the PCFDev instance is shutdown ( (by running => cf dev stop)? I noticed everything gone when I restart the instance (cf dev start -f ). Is there any way to preserve them?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Maximo11 October 2020 at 12:07

      I'm about to try PCF Dev too. This is a very good question, I wish somebody from Pivotal answers this

      Delete
  4. Ranjith31 December 2020 at 13:55

    Nice and good article. It is very useful for me to learn and understand easily. Thanks for sharing your valuable information and time. Please keep updating.

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