HashiCorp Waypoint Walkthrough

Ioannis Moustakis
FAUN — Developer Community 🐾
5 min readJan 24, 2021

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TL;DR A first view & demo of Waypoint, Hashicorp’s new tool that simplifies build, deploy and release processes.

Waypoint promises to simplify our workflows around build, deploy and release pipelines. It’s not supposed to substitute any of your current tools but rather to abstract some of the painful details of these processes.

Featuring its simplistic configuration written in HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language, attempts to help developers fast-forward their development lifecycles.

This is achieved but introducing a single workflow to build & publish images, deploy to any environment, and release them to the world.

Installation

To install Waypoint for your platform follow the official installation instructions.

Waypoint runs as a server and a client, even if only run locally. For this tutorial, you’ll run the server in Docker Desktop. If you don’t have it already installed, check here.

For purpose of this simple test drive let’s follow the examples from the official repo. To simplify things we will also select Docker as our target environment to deploy. For production use cases various deployment options on cloud providers and tools exist including AWS, Azure, GCP combined with K8s, Nomad, ECS, etc.

git clone https://github.com/hashicorp/waypoint-examples.git

There are examples in several languages, I’ll pick the python one.

cd waypoint-examples/docker/python

For the needs of this demo let’s install the Waypoint server locally:

waypoint install -platform=docker -accept-tos

Alright if we follow the output we can try to reach our server’s Web UI Address at https://localhost:9702

Waypoint also informs us that a context is created for our workflow that points to our newly created server.

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