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pier pier

Bake

A stock create installs the harnesses under cloud-init, which takes minutes. Baking pays that cost once:

pier bake    # one throwaway instance + your .pier-bake.sh, snapshotted as an AMI

Creates from a baked image drop to about 60-90 seconds.

Images are toolchains, sessions are state

Section titled “Images are toolchains, sessions are state”

Baked images are keyed to the repo, so one project’s toolchain never bleeds into another’s. pier bake installs tools. Deps, migrations, and env belong to .pier-setup.sh at boot.

Cloud-init is guarded and identical on stock and baked images. Every install step is a no-op when the image already has it. Baking is an optimization, never a requirement.

Lifecycle

Section titled “Lifecycle”

Re-baking supersedes the old image. pier teardown sweeps all baked images by tag.

Notes

Section titled “Notes”
  • Bake hooks live only in baked images. A repo with a .pier-bake.sh that was never baked runs stock. Setup then fails loudly, not silently.
  • Bake needs three extra AWS permissions: ec2:CreateImage, ec2:DeregisterImage and ec2:DeleteSnapshot.