Get started with Score

Overview

If you’re new to Score, we recommend starting with the score-compose reference implementation. It provides a helpful blueprint for using Score and allows you to become familiar with the Score specification before exploring further implementation options. score-compose is also great for local development and for building meaningful test steps into CI/CD pipelines.

1. score-compose

To begin, follow the installation instructions to install the latest version of score-compose.

2. score.yaml

Open your IDE and paste in the following score.yaml file, which describes a simple web server that queries a PostgreSQL database on each request and is exposed via a DNS. The demo code can be found here.

apiVersion: score.dev/v1b1
metadata:
  name: hello-world
  annotations:
    tags: "nodejs,http,website,javascript,postgres"
containers:
  hello-world:
    image: .
    variables:
      PORT: "3000"
      MESSAGE: "Hello, World!"
      DB_DATABASE: ${resources.db.name}
      DB_USER: ${resources.db.username}
      DB_PASSWORD: ${resources.db.password}
      DB_HOST: ${resources.db.host}
      DB_PORT: ${resources.db.port}
resources:
  db:
    type: postgres
  dns:
    type: dns
  route:
    type: route
    params:
      host: ${resources.dns.host}
      path: /
      port: 8080
service:
  ports:
    www:
      port: 8080
      targetPort: 3000

3. score-compose init

Initialize your current score-compose workspace, run the following command in your terminal:

score-compose init --no-sample

The init command will create the .score-compose directory with the default resource provisioners available.

4. score-compose generate

Convert the score.yaml file into a deployable compose.yaml, run the following command in your terminal:

score-compose generate score.yaml --image scorespec/sample-score-app:latest

The generate command will add the input score.yaml workload with a particular container image to the .score-compose/state.yaml state file and generate the output compose.yaml.

See the generated compose.yaml by running this command:

cat compose.yaml

5. docker compose up

Run docker compose up to execute the generated compose.yaml file:

docker compose up -d

[+] Running 7/7
 ✔ Network nodejs_default                      Created 
 ✔ Volume "nodejs_pg-Tut8g7-data"              Created
 ✔ Container nodejs-pg-Tut8g7-1                Healthy 
 ✔ Container nodejs-routing-CzbPM2-1           Started 
 ✔ Container nodejs-pg-Tut8g7-init-1           Exited
 ✔ Container nodejs-wait-for-resources-1       Exited 
 ✔ Container nodejs-hello-world-hello-world-1  Started

6. docker ps

See the running containers:

docker ps

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                                        COMMAND                  CREATED          STATUS                    PORTS                                     NAMES
8488aa2fe204   scorespec/sample-score-app:latest            "node index.js"          17 minutes ago   Up 17 minutes             3000/tcp                                  nodejs-hello-world-hello-world-1
22c78e726612   mirror.gcr.io/nginx:1-alpine                 "/docker-entrypoint.…"   17 minutes ago   Up 17 minutes             0.0.0.0:8080->80/tcp, [::]:8080->80/tcp   nodejs-routing-CzbPM2-1
01cc858a6162   mirror.gcr.io/postgres:17-alpine             "docker-entrypoint.s…"   17 minutes ago   Up 17 minutes (healthy)   5432/tcp                                  nodejs-pg-Tut8g7-1

7. curl localhost:8080

Test the running container, run the following command:

curl localhost:8080

Hello, World!
This is an application talking to a PostgreSQL 17.5 database on host pg-Tut8g7, deployed with Score!
PostgreSQL 17.5 on x86_64-pc-linux-musl, compiled by gcc (Alpine 14.2.0) 14.2.0, 64-bit

Congrats! You’ve successfully deploy your first Score file with the score-compose implementation with a sample workload talking to PostgreSQL and exposed via a DNS. You provisioned them through Docker, without writing the Docker Compose file by yourself.

Next steps

• Explore more examples: Check out more examples to dive into further use cases and experiment with different configurations.
• Join the Score community: Connect with fellow Score developers on our CNCF Slack channel or start find your way to contribute to Score.