Install wskdeploy with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository

Commands and aliases

• wskdeploy

Project history

The tool grew inside the Apache OpenWhisk ecosystem, whose serverless platform began as an IBM Research effort in 2015, was publicly launched on Bluemix and GitHub in February 2016, and entered the Apache Incubator later in 2016. IBM's open-source history page records that Apache OpenWhisk became an ASF Top-Level Project in July 2019, placing wskdeploy under the same Apache governance umbrella as the platform it deploys to.

The openwhisk-wskdeploy repository presents the utility as a way to write a manifest for the OpenWhisk programming model and deploy the resulting project with a single command. Its documentation also notes that the same deployment functionality became available through the OpenWhisk CLI as `wsk deploy`, so the standalone binary and the main CLI converged around the same package-manifest workflow.

Adoption history

OpenWhisk's adoption came through hosted and self-managed serverless deployments rather than through a general-purpose CLI audience. Source-backed examples include IBM Cloud Functions, Adobe I/O Runtime, and later DigitalOcean Functions in OpenWhisk historical accounts; wskdeploy mattered to that ecosystem because it turned collections of OpenWhisk entities into portable application manifests.

The Apache OpenWhisk downloads page lists Whisk Deploy alongside the main OpenWhisk CLI as a developer tool, and Apache board minutes record openwhisk-wskdeploy 1.2.0 as an ASF release on 2021-03-24. That places the utility in the official release train of OpenWhisk tooling rather than as a side project.

How it is used

Typical use is to keep an OpenWhisk application in a YAML manifest, optionally with a separate deployment file, and run `wskdeploy` against an OpenWhisk API host with credentials. The programming guide frames the workflow around package manifests, deployment files, actions, sequences, triggers, rules, API Gateway examples, environment-variable binding, and debugging manifests before applying them.

The package-nerd distinction is that wskdeploy is infrastructure-as-code for a specific FaaS runtime: it is not a generic cloud deployer, and it is most useful where OpenWhisk entities need to be exported, recreated, or promoted across OpenWhisk instances.

Why package nerds care

wskdeploy is a small but historically interesting artifact of the first wave of open-source serverless platforms. It captures OpenWhisk's model of packages, actions, triggers, and rules in declarative files, analogous to how other ecosystems grew deployment descriptors around their native resources.

Timeline

• 2015: OpenWhisk began as an IBM Research serverless computing initiative.
• 2016: OpenWhisk was launched publicly and entered the Apache Incubator.
• 2019: Apache OpenWhisk became an ASF Top-Level Project.
• 2021-03-24: Apache released openwhisk-wskdeploy 1.2.0.
• 2020s: The README documents standalone `wskdeploy` use as well as equivalent `wsk deploy` functionality in the OpenWhisk CLI.

Related projects

• Apache OpenWhisk is the serverless platform whose packages, actions, triggers, rules, and APIs are managed by wskdeploy.
• The OpenWhisk CLI embeds the same deployment workflow as `wsk deploy`, while openwhisk-client-go supplies the Go client used for OpenWhisk REST calls.

Sources

• https://github.com/apache/openwhisk-wskdeploy#readme
• https://github.com/apache/openwhisk-wskdeploy/blob/master/docs/programming_guide.md
• https://openwhisk.apache.org/documentation.html
• https://openwhisk.apache.org/downloads.html
• https://rabbah.io/openwhisk.html
• https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/OpenWhisk.html
• https://www.ibm.com/opensource/story/