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title = "SIP 023 - Build profiles" template = "main" date = "2025-03-31T12:00:00Z"

Summary: Support defining multiple build profiles for components, and running a Spin application in with those profiles.

Owner(s): till@fermyon.com

Created: March 31, 2025

Background

Building and running individual components or entire applications in configurations other than the default one is currently difficult to do with Spin: one has to manually edit the [component.name.build] tables for some or all components. This is laborious and error-prone, and can lead to accidentally committing and deploying debug/testing/profiling builds to production.

Proposal

This very simple proposal contains three parts:

  1. Adding an optional [component.name.profile.profile-name] table to use for defining additional build profiles of a component
  2. Adding a -profile [profile-name] CLI flag and SPIN_PROFILE env var to spin {build, watch, up} to use specific build profiles of all components (where available, with fallback to the default otherwise)
  3. Adding a (repeatable) -component-profile name=[profile-name] CLI flag and SPIN_COMPONENT_PROFILE="name=[profile-name],..." env var to use specific profiles for specific components

Example

The following spin.toml file shows how these parts are applied:

# (Source: <https://github.com/fermyon/ai-examples/blob/main/sentiment-analysis-ts/spin.toml>)

spin_manifest_version = 2

[application]
name = "sentiment-analysis"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["Caleb Schoepp <caleb.schoepp@fermyon.com>"]
description = "A sentiment analysis API that demonstrates using LLM inference and KV stores together"

[[trigger.http]]
route = "/api/..."
component = "sentiment-analysis"

[component.sentiment-analysis]
source = "target/spin-http-js.wasm"
allowed_outbound_hosts = []
exclude_files = ["**/node_modules"]
key_value_stores = ["default"]
ai_models = ["llama2-chat"]

[component.sentiment-analysis.build]
command = "npm run build"
watch = ["src/**/*", "package.json", "package-lock.json"]

# Debug build of the `sentiment-analysis` component:
[component.sentiment-analysis.profile.debug]
source = "target/spin-http-js.debug.wasm"

[component.sentiment-analysis.profile.debug.build]
command = "npm run build:debug"
watch = ["src/**/*", "package.json", "package-lock.json"]

[[trigger.http]]
route = "/..."
component = "ui"

# The `ui` component doesn't have a debug build, so the release build will always be used.
[component.ui]
source = { url = "<https://github.com/fermyon/spin-fileserver/releases/download/v0.0.1/spin_static_fs.wasm>", digest = "sha256:650376c33a0756b1a52cad7ca670f1126391b79050df0321407da9c741d32375" }
allowed_outbound_hosts = []
files = [{ source = "../sentiment-analysis-assets", destination = "/" }]

[variables]
kv_explorer_user = { required = true }
kv_explorer_password = { required = true }

[[trigger.http]]
component = "kv-explorer"
route = "/internal/kv-explorer/..."

[component.kv-explorer]
source = { url = "<https://github.com/fermyon/spin-kv-explorer/releases/download/v0.10.0/spin-kv-explorer.wasm>", digest = "sha256:65bc286f8315746d1beecd2430e178f539fa487ebf6520099daae09a35dbce1d" }
allowed_outbound_hosts = ["redis://*:*", "mysql://*:*", "postgres://*:*"]
# add or remove stores you want to explore here
key_value_stores = ["default"]

# Uses a pre-built debug version of the component.
[component.kv-explorer.profile.debug]
source = { url = "<https://github.com/fermyon/spin-kv-explorer/releases/download/v0.10.0/spin-kv-explorer.debug.wasm>", digest = ".." }

[component.kv-explorer.variables]
kv_credentials = "{{ kv_explorer_user }}:{{ kv_explorer_password }}"

The application defined in this manifest can be run in various configurations:

  • spin up: uses the release/default builds for everything
  • spin up --profile debug: uses builds of the profile named debug of all components that have them, default builds for the rest
  • spin up --component-profile sentiment-analysis=debug: uses the debug build of just the sentiment-analysis component, default builds for everything else

Profile-overridable fields

This proposal is focused on build configurations. As such, the fields that are supported in [component.component-name.profile.profile-name] tables are limited to:

  • source
  • command
  • watch

This set can be expanded in changes building on this initial support, as adding additional fields should always be backwards-compatible.

Profiles are all-or-nothing

When running an application with a named profile applied, components that don’t define that profile fall back to the default build configuration. The same isn’t true for individual keys in a profile: if e.g. a profile contains the source field but no command field, running spin build will not try to run the default configuration’s build command.

Local testing only

At least for now, this proposal is focused entirely on local testing: deployment through plugins is not proposed to gain support for a --profile flag.

Backwards-compatibility

This proposal should be fully backwards-compatible.

Implementation concerns

I can't see any major implementation concerns: this should hopefully be pretty straightforward.

Alternatives considered

Instead of adding generalized profiles support, we could add just a hard-coded debug profile. This would simplify the syntax a little bit, but at the cost of flexibility.

We could do so by using syntax such as

[component.sentiment-analysis.debug]
...

and changing the --profile [profile-name] flag to instead be --debug, and --component-profile sentiment-analysis=debug be --debug-component sentiment-analysis.

I’m not proposing this alternative because the benefits seem much smaller than the downsides.