Initializing new applications

[radu-matei]

Currently, Spin has no concept of "initializing" a new application without using a template (re #15).

Is there a need for a spin init command? What would it do?

[mikkelhegn]

I can only see two reasons:

1. Do not need source, but will just reference a pre-built .wasm module for components.
2. A very opinionated directory layout is preferred.

For 1. I believe the feature to re-use components with a URL reference is the best option to promote. We could have a template supporting this scenario, where the template would require the URL and Digest as part of the template creation flow.

For 2. The only thing we coudl do was to create a spin.toml file with no components (a few lines). This could also be a template, e.g., empty app.

[itowlson]

FWIW there is a http-empty template, which is a spin.toml with no components, but it does set the application trigger to HTTP.

[michelleN]

@radu-matei What is the use case you're targeting for initializing a new application? What kind of workflow are you envisioning?

[michelleN]

Thinking about this more, I would use this now if spin init was just creating a spin.toml file in the current directory.

[itowlson]

Additional context: #1525 (comment)

[michelleN]

Considering we have an --init flag on spin new now, do we still want to have a new top level command for 2.0? Should we try out spin new --init for a while and come back to this post 2.0?

[itowlson]

At this stage I would be strongly in favour of not attempting this for 2.0. With Manifest 2, it becomes a lot more practical than it was with Manifest 1 though, so getting rid of what is now a slightly artificial http-empty template seems like a good plan!

[calebschoepp]

Is this still something we want @radu-matei @michelleN? I happened across this issue and it feels like possibly this use case is no longer valid and we could close this issue.