Matterless: putting serverless on your server

Serverless computing enables you to build applications that automatically scale with demand, and your wallet. Within seconds, serverless application can scale from handling 0 requests per day to thousands of requests per second. This is the power of the cloud at its best.

But, what if all you want is check open pull requests on your Github repo at 9am every morning, and send a reminder message on your team’s chat channel?

What if you want to create a chat bot that adds a “high five” reaction to any message containing the phrase “high five”?

What if all you want to do is blink your smart lights whenever your backup drive runs out of disk space?

What if you’re too lazy to create an AWS, Azure or GCP account or scared to connect it to your credit card?

What if you have a Raspberry Pi sitting in your closet that’s not doing anything useful, or you were looking for a quasi-valid reason to buy one?

What if you prefer to be in full control of your code, infrastructure and data?

Matterless may just be what you've been waiting for all this time.

Matterless brings the serverless programming model to your own server, laptop or even Raspberry Pi. It is simple to use, fast to deploy, and... let's just call a spade a spade, it's awesome.

Why?

1. Matterless is distributed as a single binary with no required dependencies (Matterless relies on Deno as its main runtime, but will download it on-the-fly).
2. Matterless requires zero configuration to run (although it does give you options).
3. Matterless is light-weight: it runs fine on a Raspberry Pi. There's no fancy container orchestration, Kubernetes or firecrackers involved.
4. Matterless enables extremely rapid iteration: Matterless applications tend to (re)deploy within a second or two. A common mode of development is to have Matterless watch for file changes and reload on every file save.

Matterless is not attempting to be a replacement for AWS, Azure or GCP. If you need to scale from 0 to thousands of requests per second, Matterless likely won't cut it. Matterless' sweet spot is likely in building scratch-your-own-itch micro applications you may have a need for, but wouldn't require the extreme scalability the full cloud provides.

Nevertheless, its programming model is serverless-esque, because you...

• Use Matterless functions to respond to events.
• Use Matterless events to glue different parts of your application together.
• Use the Matterless store API (a simple key-value store) to store persistent application data.
• (Coming soon) Use Matterless queues to schedule work to be performed asynchronously.

ExcaliDraw

In addition, to enable extending Matterless in Matterless ( it’s Matterless all the way down), Matterless adds:

• Matterless jobs to write code that runs continuously in the background and connects with external systems, generally exposing anything interesting inside your application as events (e.g. via a (web)socket connection, or polling).
• A macro system based on Go template syntax to create new, higher-level definition types (we’ll get to that).

Under the hood, Matterless relies on the following technologies:

1. Matterless is written in Go.
2. Its data store uses LevelDB (in fact its Go implementation) under the hood.
3. Matterless' default runtime is Deno. Deno runs JavaScript and Typescript code in a secure sandbox. Therefore, functions and jobs don't have access to the local file system and cannot spawn local processes. And don't worry, you don't need to have Deno installed, it will be downloaded automatically for you on first launch. In the future other runtimes will be supported.

Sounds interesting? You would be correct. You have good judgement.

Sidebar: For the YouTube generation

If you're part of the YouTube generation and prefer these concepts to be explained to you in a screencast video with my face in a bubble, there is good news. You can experience this here:

• Matterless introduction: what is serverless and matterless, and why put it on your server?
• Matterless 101: functions, events, jobs and the event and store APIs
• Matterless 101: macros

More videos coming soon.

Back to the textual content.

What is a Matterless application

A Matterless application consists of declarative definitions written in a matterless definition file. One matterless definition file defines one application, although you can import other files via URLs. Naturally, matterless definition files use the .md file extension. You may think: "Hey, but that’s already used by Markdown!" Conveniently, Matterless' application format is markdown with specific semantics, so that all works out well — and it looks great when rendered on Github (and ultimately it's all about what code looks like on Github).

In principle, arbitrary Markdown is allowed in a .md file and Matterless will accept it. Documenting your application this way is encouraged. It looks like literate programming is finally coming to fruition (you’re welcome, Donald).

However, when you use headers (# nested at any level) and the first word of the header starts with a lowercase letter (which is a big no in regular writing anyway, capitalize your headers, people!), Matterless interprets it as a Matterless definition.

So. This is the point in the README where it is revealed that the README.md file you're reading right now, is in fact a valid and even somewhat useful Matterless application! Try it out with mls run README.md!

I'll wait until you put together your mind, which has just been blown.

Back to the primitives

Matterless currently supports the following core primitive definition types:

• function (or func if you're lazy): for defining short-running functions that can be triggered e.g. when certain events occur.
• job: for defining long-running background processes that for instance connect to external systems, and trigger events as a result.
• library: for defining reusable modules (deno only supported for now) that will be available in every job and function in the app.
• events: for mapping events to functions to be triggered. There are certain built-in events that will automically trigger under certain conditions (e.g. when writing to the data store, or when certain URLs are called on Matterless’s HTTP Gateway).
• macro: for defining new abstractions that map to a combination of existing matterless definitions.
• imports: for importing externally defined (addressed via URLs) matterless definitions into your application (often used to import macros).

In addition, defined macros can of course be instantiated.

Matterless APIs

Inside of function and job code (which in the future will be able to use multiple runtimes, but use Deno for now), you have access to a few Matterless APIs:

• store: a simple key-value store with the following operations:
  • store.put(key, value) a specific value for a key.
  • store.get(key) to fetch the value for a specific key.
  • store.del(key) to delete a key from the database.
  • store.queryPrefix(prefix) to fetch all keys and their values prefixed with prefix.
• events: a simple event bus
  • publish(eventName, eventData) to publish a custom event (that can be listened to via a event definition in your definition file).
• functions: invoke functions by name
  • invoke(functionName, eventData) to invoke function functionName with eventData.

But any arbitrary deno libraries can be imported as well.

Matterless 101

Here is "Hello world" in Matterless:

# function HelloWorld
```javascript
function handle(event) {
    console.log("Hello world!");
}
```

Save this to hello.md and run it as follows:

$ mls run hello.md

This will do shockingly little, because nothing is invoking this function yet. However, Matterless comes with a simple console we can use to manually invoke this function (if you don't see the hello> prompt hit Enter first).

We can manually invoke our function with an empty event as follows:

hello> invoke HelloWorld {}

This will print something along the lines of:

INFO[0015] [App: hello | Function: HelloWorld] Starting deno function runtime. 
INFO[0016] [App: hello | Function: HelloWorld] Hello world! 

Success!

For the remainder of this README Matterless definitions will be inlined as Markdown, so they're easier to read.

Let's look at the function definition type and other support definition types more closely.

Matterless Definition Types

These are the definition types currently supported and how to use them.

function MyFunction

As of this writing, JavaScript is the primary supported language. More runtimes (based on docker) will be added in the future.

The JavaScript function that will be invoked needs to be called handle and take a single argument: event, which will receive event data (depending on how the function will be triggered) and may or may not return a result.

While technically in most cases a Deno process instance with your function code inside it will be reused (it's not relaunched for every invocation), you should assume a stateless environment. While technically you have full access to all Deno APIs, your function may be killed at any time along with all its in-memory and disk state. In fact, in the current implementation will indeed happen after a brief amount of time of inactivity.

A function definition may contain an optional configuration YAML block:

init:
  name: Donald Knuth
runtime: deno

The values put into init (which usually would be an object, but it could be an YAML array as well) will be passed to the init JavaScript function upon cold start:

function init(config) {
    console.log(`Hello there, I'm initing for ${config.name}`);
}

function handle(event) {
    console.log("I was just run with", event);
}

When first invoked, this will log something along the lines of:

INFO[0017] [App: README | Function: MyFunction] Hello there, I'm initing for Donald Knuth
INFO[0017] [App: README | Function: MyFunction] I was just run with {}

Subsequent invocations will skip the initialization.

job StarGazerPoll

Jobs are much like functions, except they boot up immediately upon the application start and keep running during the lifetime of the application. Like functions, jobs support an optional YAML configuration block:

init:
  repo: "zefhemel/matterless"
  pollInterval: 60
  event: starschanged

Rather than implementing the handle JavaScript function, a job implements start and (optionally) stop.

In this example we're going to poll the Github API every 60 seconds to see if the number of stars on the matterless repository has changed and publishing a starschanged event when it does. Note that this example uses various core Matterless APIs: store and events to track state between runs. Theoretically a global variable could be used, but this value would be lost between restarts of the app:

import {store, events} from "./matterless.ts";

let config;

function init(cfg) {
    console.log("Inited with", cfg);
    config = cfg;
}

function start() {
    console.log("Starting now")
    setInterval(async () => {
        // Pull old star count from the store (or set to 0 if no value)
        let oldStarCount = (await store.get("stars")) || 0;

        // Talk to Github API to fetch new value
        let result = await fetch(`https://api.github.com/repos/${config.repo}`);
        let json = await result.json();
        let newCount = json.stargazers_count;

        // It changed!
        if (newCount !== oldStarCount) {
            // Publish event
            await events.publish(config.event, {
                stars: newCount
            });
            // Store new value in store
            await store.put("stars", newCount);
        } else {
            console.log("No change :-(");
        }
    }, config.pollInterval * 1000);
}

function stop() {
    console.log("Shutting down stargazer poller");
}

events

Using events mappings we define which events should invoke which functions. Multiple functions can be invoked in response to a single event, therefore we specify them as a list:

starschanged:
  - StarGazeReporter
http:GET:/myAPI:
  - MyHTTPAPI

function StarGazeReporter

function handle(event) {
    console.log("Number of stars changed to", event.stars);
}

System events

HTTP Events

Matterless always spins up a HTTP server. This server serves multiple purposes:

1. It allows a Matterless client to talk to a Matterless server, e.g. to deploy new applications, update them, delete them.
2. It exposes built-in APIs to Matterless applications, such as for the data store, events and function invocation.
3. Matterless applications can expose custom HTTP endpoints, e.g. to be called by outside systems such as webhooks.

This section is how to achieve that last one: create your own custom HTTP endpoints for your matterless application.

All you need to do is listen to an event of a certain pattern, e.g. http:GET:/myAPI, which will be invoked when requesting, in this case: http://localhost:8222/README/myAPI. The pattern being: $yourmatterlessserver/$appname/path . HTTP events are named following the pattern http:$method:$path. The function that is triggered needs return a HTTP response.

function MyHTTPAPI

function handle(req) {
    return {
        status: 200,
        body: "Hello there!"
    };
}

In your response object you can specify:

• status: a HTTP status code
• headers: an object with headers (e.g. {"Content-type": "application/json"})
• body: either as a string or as an object, in which case it will be JSON encoded

The req event here will contain request data:

• path: the URL path
• method: the HTTP request method
• headers: an object with headers
• request_params: containing an object with request parameters (e.g. ?name=bla would result in {name: "bla"})
• form_values:when posted as application/x-www-form-urlencoded
• json_body: when posted as application/json

Store events

Whenever a key is put or deleted from the store, an event is triggered with the pattern store:put:$key and store:del:$key containing the key and new_value (in case of puts) as data in the event. You can subscribe to specific updates to keys, or use the wildcard * notation to be notified of all changes to keys matching a certain pattern (in this case when any change is made to a key starting with config:):

events

store:put:config:*:
  - ConfigChanged

function ConfigChanged

function handle(event) {
    console.log(`Config key ${event.key} was changed to "${event.new_value}"!`);
}

Try it to see that this works via the mls console:

README> put config:myRandomConfig "Matterless is cool"

Which should log something along the lines of

INFO[0014] [App: README | Function: ConfigChanged] Starting deno function runtime. 
INFO[0014] [App: README | Function: ConfigChanged] Config key config:myRandomConfig was changed to "Matterless is cool"! 

macro httpApi

What makes Matterless really powerful is the ability to add new definition types using Matterless itself.

The idea is simple, yet powerful. You define a macro, and define its arguments (the YAML attributes that need to be passed to instantiate it) using YAML schema (which is really JSON schema encoded in YAML).

Let me explain this with a simple example. Let's say you don't like the event notation to create HTTP endpoints, and would like to introduce a specialized "httpApi" definition type that is nicer to read and write. We can achieve this as follows.

First we define the argument schema:

schema:
  type: object
  properties:
    path:
      type: string
    method:
      type: string
    function:
      type: string
  required:
    - path
    - method
    - function

This specifies the httpApi macro takes three required properties:

• path (the URL path to match), a string
• method (the HTTP method), also a string
• function the Matterless function to trigger when the endpoint is called.

Then, we define a template to translate this using the Go template syntax. Inside this template we can use two special variables: $name which will contain the name of the template definition ( e.g. when we create httpApi MyAPI then $name will contain MyAPI), and $arg which will contain all arguments.

Here is the template:

## events
```yaml
"http:{{$arg.method}}:{{$arg.path}}":
- {{$arg.function}}
```

That's all, now we can use it:

httpApi MyAPI

path: /anotherAPI
method: GET
function: MyHTTPAPI

Now, simply visit http://localhost:8222/README/anotherAPI to see that it works!

Need more? Have a look at the samples and the start of a Matterless standard library of macros.

Installing Matterless

Requirements:

• Go 1.16 or newer

Tested on Mac (Apple Silicon) and Linux (AMD64), although other platforms should work as well.

$ go get github.com/zefhemel/matterless/...
$ go install github.com/zefhemel/matterless/cmd/mls@latest

This will install the binaries in your $GOPATH/bin.

Running Matterless

Matterless has three modes of operation:

1. All-in-one mode via mls run, this will run both the server and client in a single process. This is useful for development, especially with the -w option that watches the files you point to for changes:

   $ mls run -w myapp.md 

   It will also immediately kick you into the Matterless console, which allows you to manually trigger events, invoke functions and perform various store operations.
2. Server mode by simply running mls optionally with arguments like -p to bind to a specific port (defaults to 8222), --data to select the data directory (default: ./mls-data) and --token to use a specific admin token (generates one by default):

   $ mls --data /var/data/mls 

3. Client/deploy mode to deploy code to a remote (or local) matterless server:

   $ mls deploy --url http://mypi:8222 --token mysecrettoken -w myapp.md

Enjoy!