DSC to Bicep Types Generator

This is a work-in-progress app to convert DSC type definitions to Bicep's format, and now includes a DSC gRPC server (written in Rust) to support bicep local-deploy.

With no arguments, this app will attempt to get the schemas for each available DSC resource by shelling out to dsc (and each resources subcommands if the manifest isn't embedded, so be sure to have a build of DSC in the PATH.

The app will then run bicep publish-extension ... --target out/dsc.tgz where the rest of the arguments are the generated types (in the out directory) and the dscbicep binary, which currently only exists in DSC's biecp-gRPC branch.

That emitted tarball is an OCI artifact recognized by Bicep as an extension, which we then need to configure. Note that that the only experimental feature of Bicep we're using now is Local Deploy. The extension contains the generated type definitions and dscbicep, which is a small gRPC server that handles requests from bicep local-deploy by calling into dsc-lib. At no point are we passing JSON files to DSC, or calling the dsc CLI. Using Local Deploy, Bicep remains the orchestrator of Bicep code, meaning that everything just works. The gRPC server is implemented in in PR #1330.

On Windows, Rust doesn't really support Unix Domain Sockets so Bicep needed to be patched to prefer Named Pipes. Until PR #18712 is merged and a new release is out, a developer build of that will be needed too. This does not apply to macOS.

In bicepconfig.json enable extensibility and add the extension:

{
  "experimentalFeaturesEnabled": {
    "localDeploy": true
  },
  "extensions": {
    "dsc": "./out/dsc.tgz"
  },
  "implicitExtensions": []
}

Then at the top of your Bicep file, enable both the extension and the local target scope:

extension dsc
targetScope = 'local'

See example.bicep, macos.bicep, windows.bicep and their associated .bicepparam files for more detailed examples.

Use the Local Deploy VS Code task to launch one of the examples. It's equivalent to: bicep local-deploy example.bicepparam, but patches the path to the dev build of Bicep and has some environment variables you can edit for debugging.

Building

1. Install Node.js, for this extension
2. Install Rust, for DSC
3. Install .NET SDK, for Bicep
4. Clone this repo: git clone https://github.com/microsoft/bicep-types-dsc.git
5. Clone DSC feature branch: git clone -b bicep-gRPC https://github.com/andyleejordan/DSC.git
6. Clone Bicep feature branch: git clone -b named-pipes https://github.com/andyleejordan/bicep.git
7. Open this project's multi-root workspace: code bicep-types-dsc/bicep-types-dsc.code-workspace
8. Setup bicep-types submodule in bicep-types-dsc:
   1. git submodule update --init
   2. cd bicep-types/src/bicep-types
   3. npm install && npm run build
9. Run Publish Extension VS Code workspace build task, equivalent to:
   • cd dsc && ./build.ps1 -Project dscbicep
   • cd bicep-types-dsc && npm start (might need npm install first)
10. Run Build CLI VS Code Bicep task, equivalent to:
    • cd bicep && dotnet build src/Bicep.Cli/Bicep.Cli.csproj

DSC sometimes needs the CFS Cargo feed updated. A Microsoft employee can add -UseCFS to the build command. This project sometimes needs the CFS NPM feed updated. A Microsoft employee can follow a GUI-driven login procedure.