Pebble-Wrapper

The Problem

The Pebble SDK has a pretty bad case of code rot nowadays. The world has moved on from reliance on Nodejs 10.x and Python2.7 but the pebble SDK has not. This is quickly becoming a blocker for would be app developers trying to install the SDK on their modern systems.

The Solution

The pebble-wrapper side steps this issue by loosely wrapping pebble commands in a container runtime. A pre-made image that contains the SDK is spun up per project and commands are passed to the container runtime instead of being ran locally on the machine.

Pre-requisites

• Container runtime (docker/podman)
• jq (sudo apt install jq)

Example pre-requisites setup on Ubuntu 22.04

sudo apt update
sudo apt install podman jq

Installation

Download the contents of tools/pebble-wrapper.sh from this repository:

curl -fsS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kennedn/pebble-wrapper/master/tools/pebble-wrapper.sh > pebble-wrapper.sh

If you are using docker, you will need to re-configure the CONTAINER_RUNTIME and EXTRA_RUN_ARGS variables in the script, change:

# Set up args for podman or docker  depending on the container runtime installed
CONTAINER_RUNTIME="podman"
EXTRA_RUN_ARGS="--userns=keep-id"

#CONTAINER_RUNTIME="docker"
#EXTRA_RUN_ARGS=""

to:

# Set up args for podman or docker  depending on the container runtime installed
#CONTAINER_RUNTIME="podman"
#EXTRA_RUN_ARGS="--userns=keep-id"

CONTAINER_RUNTIME="docker"
EXTRA_RUN_ARGS=""

Set execute permissions on the script:

chmod 755 pebble-wrapper.sh

Configure the pebble alias for the script:

alias pebble="$(pwd)/pebble-wrapper.sh"

cd to your project folder:

cd some-project

Invoke the script

pebble -h

NOTE: The first run will take a while as it needs to download the container image

Behaviour

For each folder in which the pebble-wrapper script is invoked, a container will be spun up. Therefor, it is important to cd to the desired pebble project folder before invoking the script.

If a container is already running for the current folder, pebble commands will simply be passed to this container.

To clean-down pebble containers after you are finished developing: pebble clean-containers

Besides this, with the alias set, the wrapper behaves exactly like the pebble tool. Please refer to the official pebble-tool documentation for usage outside of the wrapper functions.

Known Issues

Problem

pebble install does not work

To be able to return the prompt to the user, pebble install spins up a detached qemu-pebble process. This does not play nice with the docker exec command being run under the hood.

Solution

Invoke pebble install with the --logs command line argument to make it stick around after spinning up qemu-pebble