The Knit tutorial uses the Star Wars API as a running example throughout. It contains the following parts:
- Star Wars Knit client app in TypeScript 🧑💻 🌐
- Star Wars Knit gateway or (embeddable gateway in Go)
- Star Wars Knit relation service in TypeScript or Go
- Star Wars film service in TypeScript or Go
- Star Wars starship service in TypeScript or Go
All parts of the tutorial include full code which can be run from the
terminal. Give the system a try by cloning this repo with
git clone https://github.com/bufbuild/knit.git and launch the
separate parts by following the instructions in their respective READMEs
linked above.
The tutorial chooses to use individual processes for everything, so each component is its own sub-directory and has its own README that shows how to run that part of the system:
%%{ init: { 'flowchart': { 'curve': 'basis' } } }%%
flowchart LR
A[Knit Client] --> B[Knit Gateway]
subgraph r [Knit Relation Service]
R{{Relation RPCs}}
end
subgraph f [Film Service]
F{{Film RPCs}}
end
subgraph s [Starship Service]
S{{Starship RPCs}}
end
B --> R
B --> F
B --> S
The Knit client app issues queries via the the Knit gateway. Executing Knit queries in the gateway may require calling the RPCs of the other services, and the Knit gateway plans out the correct order, and flow of required data from responses into subsequent requests until a query is fully executed.
The Film service and Starship service are just normal gRPC services. In this tutorial they are built using connect-es and connect-go, there is nothing Knit specific about them, however they are needed for the tutorial.
The Knit RelationService extends the Film of FilmService with a
new field called starships, without needing to modify Film or
FilmService, and shows how such relations can be added to a system
using Knit.
Writing the services and client app from scratch will require the
buf CLI, Node.js and Go, see the install instructions for the
buf CLI, Node.js and Go.