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Upload Your Service

Your service is now cloned on your machine, but needs to be ported to the Rover to run. To do this, we will use roverctl.

Elias Groot

Elias Groot

Software Lead, Project Administrator

Prerequisites​

Packaging a Service​

To package a service, you need to:

  • Contain all service files in one folder that can be uploaded to the Rover
  • Have a valid service.yaml file at the root of this folder

With your current template open, this is already taken care of for you.

Power on your Rover, put it on its stand and wait until it boots.

Upload a Service​

To upload one or more service directories, you should use the roverctl upload command.

Open a terminal outside VS Code and cd into your service template's root directory (i.e. the directory with the service.yaml file). Then, use roverctl upload like so:

# Upload your current working directory (.) to Rover 12
roverctl upload . --rover 12

Confirm that your service is uploaded by running the roverctl service command.

# View all services installed on Rover 12
roverctl services --rover 12
# tip: you can also use shorthands
roverctl svc -r 12

Then, query the service details by running the roverctl service info command.

# View service information about your service on Rover 12
roverctl services info elias my-example-service 1.0.0 --rover 12

Upload Workflow​

Every time you make changes to your service's source code, you will need to reupload your service. This can become annoying, so roverctl packs a file watcher that automatically reuploads your service once changes are detected. You can enable it with the --watch flag:

# Upload your current working directory (.) to Rover 12 and automatically reupload if there are changes
roverctl upload . --rover 12 --watch

If you are working on multiple services in parallel and don't want to keep multiple terminals open, you can also specify multiple paths to upload and watch:

# Upload ./dir-a and ./dir-b to Rover 12 and automatically reupload them if there are changes
roverctl upload ./dir-a ./dir-b --rover 12 --watch

We highly recommend using roverctl's upload capabilities to sync your service files to the Rover. In case the Rover file system gets corrupted, you will always have your files saved on your own machine.

Start your Service​

To start your service, open roverctl-web.

# Open roverctl-web for Rover 12
roverctl --rover 12

Create a pipeline with only your service enabled and press "start execution".

You will find that execution fails due to your service depending on the "path" stream from the "imaging" service. This means that your template service expects to communicate with an "imaging" service by reading from it. We will see how this is done in code, and how we can start our pipeline successfully.