How the Engine works

The Athena Engine is a simple and declarative Bash framework, implemented using only Bash functions and it takes care of tasks like routing, errors, messages, stacktrace, testing, versioning, validation, etc.

Structure

The directory structure is very simple as you can see in the following schema :

.
├── athena  # executable
├── ...
├── lib # location of the library functions
│   └── ...
├── plugins # location of the plugins
│   └── ...
└── tests   # location of the
    └── ...

Namespaces

Even though it is not very tipical for Bash functions to have namespaces, we defined namespacing to avoid collision of functions. The pattern is

athena.<context>.<function_name>

The context is used to group functions, for instance, all functions related to handling arguments should be grouped under the athena.argument. namespace. As an example, to check if an argument exists you can use the following function :

athena.argument.argument_exists <argument_name>

The context also defines the name of the file where the functions are located. The pattern for the files is :

lib/[<shared_or_not>/]functions.<context>.sh

Using the functions

You can use the functions of Athena in 2 contexts, HOST or SHARED. Using on the HOST means that the function is being used directly on the machine that has Athena installed, on the other hand SHARED means that you can use it either on the host or inside the container that will provide the environment for your plugin.

• HOST only functions

  • located in the lib folder
  • loaded automatically on the host
  • can be used only on the PRE and POST commands

• SHARED functions

  • located in the lib/shared folder
  • loaded automatically on the host and on the container when the default router is being used
  • can only be used on the inner commands