Building an Encore application requires access to both the Encore runtime (the encore.dev package) as well as a custom-built
(Go runtime) to implement Encore's request semantics and automated instrumentation.
As a result the Encore Daemon must know where these two things exist on the filesystem in order to properly compile the Encore application.
This must be done in one of two ways: embedding the installation path at compile time (similar to GOROOT)
or by setting an environment variable at runtime.
The environment variables are:
ENCORE_GOROOT– the path to encore-go on diskENCORE_RUNTIME_PATH– the path to theencore.devruntime implementation.
ENCORE_RUNTIME_PATH can be set to location of the compiler/runtime package in this repository,
while ENCORE_GOROOT must be pointed to where encore-go was built.
For more information on this see cli/daemon/internal/env/env.go.
The code base is divided into several parts:
The encore command line interface. The encore background daemon
is located at cli/daemon and is responsible for managing processes,
setting up databases and talking with the Encore servers for operations like
fetching production logs.
The Encore Parser statically analyzes Encore apps to build up a model
of the application dubbed the Encore Syntax Tree (EST) that lives in
parser/est.
For speed the parser does not perform traditional type-checking; it does limited type-checking for enforcing Encore-specific rules but otherwise relies on the underlying Go compiler to perform type-checking as part of building the application.
The Encore Compiler rewrites the source code based on the parsed Encore Syntax Tree to create a fully functioning application. It rewrites API calls & API handlers, injects instrumentation and secret values, and more.