High quality Google Cloud service emulators for local development stacks

At FullStory, our entire product and backend software stack runs in each engineer's local workstation. This high-quality local development experience keeps our engineers happy and productive, because they are able to:

• build and test features locally
• reproduce and fix bugs quickly and easily
• run high-quality services in unit and integration tests

Our local development and testing story is simpler when our live code can rely on expected services to exist, and we don't have to write as many mocks.

Some of the ways we achieve this:

• Our own backend services operate in a reasonable manner in a local environment.
• Open source, third party services (such as Redis, Zookeeper, or Solr) run locally.
• We emulate Google Cloud infrastructure.

Our bigtable emulator is a fork of bigtable/bttest. A summary of the changes we made:

• The core operates directly on Bigtable protobuf types, such as Table and Row, instead of bespoke types.
• The storage layer is pluggable and operates on protos.
• Leveldb is the default storage implementation, and runs either in-memory (transient for unit tests) or on disk (long running, persistence).

go install github.com/fullstorydev/emulators/bigtable/...@latest

Example, running on a specific port, with persistence:

> cbtemulator -port 8888 -dir var/bigtable
Writing to: var/bigtable
Cloud Bigtable emulator running on 127.0.0.1:8888

Usage:

  -dir string
    	if set, use persistence in the given directory
  -host string
    	the address to bind to on the local machine (default "localhost")
  -port int
    	the port number to bind to on the local machine (default 9000)

You can link bigtable emulator into existing Go binaries as a drop-in replacement for bigtable/bttest.

For unit tests:

	// start an in-memory leveldb BigTable test server (for unit tests)
	srv, err := bttest.NewServer("127.0.0.1:0", grpc.MaxRecvMsgSize(math.MaxInt32))
	if err != nil { 
		// ...
	}
	defer srv.Close()
	// bigtable.NewClient (via DefaultClientOptions) will look at this env var to figure out what host to talk to
	os.Setenv("BIGTABLE_EMULATOR_HOST", svr.Addr)

For on-disk persistence:

	// start an leveldb-backed BigTable test server
	srv, err := bttest.NewServerWithOptions(fmt.Sprintf("127.0.0.1:%d", *btport), bttest.Options{
		Storage: bttest.LeveldbDiskStorage{
			Root: bigtableStorageDir,
			ErrLog: func(err error, msg string) {
				// wire into logging
			},
		},
		GrpcOpts: []grpc.ServerOption{grpc.MaxRecvMsgSize(maxGrpcMessageSize)},
	})

	// assuming BIGTABLE_EMULATOR_HOST is already set...
	conn, err := grpc.Dial(os.Getenv("BIGTABLE_EMULATOR_HOST"), grpc.WithInsecure())
	if err != nil {
		// ...
	}
	defer conn.Close() // only if the life cycle is scoped to this call

	client, err := bigtable.NewClient(ctx, project, instance, option.WithGRPCConn(conn))
	if err != nil {
		// ...
	}
	tbl := client.Open("example")

Our storage emulator was written in house.

• Supports basic file operations, iteration, attributes, copying, and some conditionals.
• The storage layer is pluggable.
• In memory btree (transient for unit tests) or disk-based storage (long running, persistence).

go install github.com/fullstorydev/emulators/storage/...@latest

Example, running on a specific port, with persistence:

> gcsemulator -port 8888 -dir var/storage
Writing to: var/storage
Cloud Storage emulator running on http://127.0.0.1:8888

Usage:

  -dir string
    	if set, use persistence in the given directory
  -host string
    	the address to bind to on the local machine (default "localhost")
  -port int
    	the port number to bind to on the local machine (default 9000)

For unit tests:

	// start an in-memory Storage test server (for unit tests)
	svr, err := gcsemu.NewServer("127.0.0.1:0", gcsemu.Options{})
	if err != nil {
		// ...
	}
	defer svr.Close()
	// gcsemu.NewClient will look at this env var to figure out what host/port to talk to
	os.Setenv("GCS_EMULATOR_HOST", svr.Addr)

For on-disk persistence:

	// start an on-disk Storage test server
	svr, err := gcsemu.NewServer(fmt.Sprintf("127.0.0.1:%d", *port), gcsemu.Options{
		Store: gcsemu.NewFileStore(*gcsDir),
	})

	// assuming GCS_EMULATOR_HOST is already set...
	client, err := gcsemu.NewClient(ctx)
	if err != nil {
		// ...
	}
	defer client.Close() // only if the life cycle is scoped to this call

Do NOT use STORAGE_EMULATOR_HOST, as defined in cloud.google.com/go/storage. There are unresolved issues in the Go client implementation. STORAGE_EMULATOR_HOST is supported inconsistently, and even has some bugs that can cause data races when using the same *storage.Client for different types of access.

See:

• storage: when using an emulator, it is not possible to use the same Client object for both uploading and other operations #2476
• Storage: empty readHost when STORAGE_EMULATOR_HOST is set to host:port #4444

Instead, use our gcsemu.NewClient(ctx) method which swaps out the entire HTTP transport.