Local Development for Space

Since the introduction of Deta Space, developers have been asking for a better experience when building locally for Space. Whether it is managing keys or coordinating between two separate Micros, local development requires unnecessary work.

We are happy to announce that the newest Space CLI can now do a lot of the heavy lifting, with a single command: space dev.

space dev: run your Space app locally

If you’ve got a Space project you want to run locally, just run the following command, from the root of your project:

space dev

Et voila! Your app is now running locally and you can access it at http://localhost:4200 (the Space CLI will tell you this). You can also add the --open flag to open the app in your browser automatically.

Behind the scenes, the Space CLI is:

• Generating and injecting a Data Key to allow your app to write data to your project
• Running each of your Micros in a separate process (using a new dev command from your Spacefile)
• Exposing all of your Micros through a single entrypoint (following the routing in your Spacefile)

For more information on how setup and use the command, make sure to check out the docs.

Triggering Scheduled Actions from the CLI

If your Spacefile contains a Scheduled Action, you can also now trigger it locally for testing.

For example, if you have the following Spacefile:

micros:
  - name: backend
    src: backend
    engine: nodejs16
    run: "node index.js"
    dev: "nodemon index.js"
    actions:
      - id: "cleanup"
        name: "Clean Up"
        description: "Cleans up unused data"
        trigger: "schedule"
        default_interval: "0/15 * * * *"

After starting the app locally with space dev, you can now trigger the cleanup action by running the following command:

space dev trigger cleanup

Behind the scenes, the Space CLI will:

• Send the action event to your Micro locally
• Print the returned response to your console (if any)

Running local scripts against your project’s Bases & Drives

The space exec commands allows you to give a local command or script access to your project’s Deta Base and Drive data. It does so by creating and injecting a Data Key as DETA_PROJECT_KEY into your local environment.

space exec --project <project-id> -- node init-database.js

Some use cases include:

• testing Base & Drive locally
• pre-filling your projects Bases & Drives with data
• programmatically interacting with Base & Drive
• … anything else you can think of!

Upgrading to the new CLI

To use all the new commands, make sure to upgrade to the latest version of the Space CLI, with the following command:

space version upgrade

That’s all for now. Thank you for all the feedback — please continue to share!