Hi Team, Currently for OpenWhisk admin operation we have tooling implemented in couple of python scripts like wskadmin, tools/db/* etc. These script currently talk directly to CouchDB to perform required actions.
Sometime back I discussed the option to support other databases [1] and it was suggested to have wskadmin support various db backends. However looking into other scripts I found some of the tool/db would also be useful in context of other backends also. To simplify this aspect going forward it may be better to implement the important tooling in Scala itself as a separate sub module in core repo. This module would produce a 'fat runnable jar' which would be including all required dependency and can be used as a standalone cli tool. We used similar approach in Apache Jackrabbit Oak [2] where we produce this single jar which consolidates all the admin tooling. This has over the years became primary admin tooling for us. Such an approach would have following benefits 1. Implemented in Scala and thus able to leverage existing abstractions like ArtifactStore 2. For some of the bulk db operations it would be possible to leverage Akka Streams to implement simpler multi threaded flows. 3. Easy to implement tests for the tooling part 4. User management operations can be done via existing ArtifactStore feature set. So one implementation can work against multiple stores 5. No other runtime dependency i.e. specific Python version or Python module need to be deployed. Just have JDK 1.8 and use the jar in standalone manner. No need to even check out whole OpenWhisk repo Key requirement for such a tooling would be to be compatible with existing CLI argument format. If such an approach makes sense I can work on PR to give it a try! Chetan Mehrotra [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/921a0a6350a7ec3a2dc77564612de59104995622f8417583291f20bc@%3Cdev.openwhisk.apache.org%3E [2] https://github.com/apache/jackrabbit-oak/tree/trunk/oak-run
