Encore – Backend Development Platform

🏁 Try Encore: Quick Start Guide / Example Applications

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Most backend applications use a small set of common building blocks: services, APIs, databases, queues, caches, and cron jobs. The real complexity lies in provisioning and managing the underlying infrastructure, and the endless boilerplate that's required to tie it all together in your application.

Encore simplifies backend development by providing a set of cloud-agnostic APIs that let you declare and use these common building blocks as objects directly in your code.

Encore parses your application and builds a graph of both its logical architecture and its infrastructure requirements. It then automatically provisions the necessary infrastructure, instruments your application with logs and traces, and much more.

It works the same way for local development, preview and dev environments, and in production using your own cloud account.

This completely removes the need for infrastructure configuration files, increases standardization in your application code and its infrastructure, and makes your application portable across cloud providers by default.

Learn more about using Encore's building blocks in the docs:

• Services and APIs
• Databases
• Cron Jobs
• PubSub
• Caching

• Microservices without complexity: Define services and API endpoints with a single line of Go code, and call APIs using regular function calls.

• Cloud building blocks at your fingertips: Use built-in cloud-agnostic APIs for building blocks like databases, queues, caches, and scheduled tasks.

• Built-in DevOps: Run git push encore to build, test, provision the necessary cloud infrastructure, and deploy.

• Provision environments automatically: Deploy to unlimited dev/preview/cloud environments without code changes. Encore provisions the necessary infrastructure and ensures environments stay in sync.

• Preview environments: Integrate with GitHub to automatically set up each pull request as an ephemeral preview environment.

• Deploy to your existing cloud account: Encore deploys your application to your existing cloud account in AWS/GCP/Azure, using best practices for building secure and scalable distributed systems.

• Intelligent architecture diagrams: Visualise your application in real-time with automated and interactive architecture diagrams.

• Distributed Tracing: Your application is automatically instrumented to capture information about API calls, goroutines, HTTP requests, database queries, and more.

• Secrets management: Securely store and use secrets, and API keys, without doing any work. Define secrets in your code, like any other variable, and Encore takes care of the rest.

• Automated API documentation: Encore parses your source code to understand the request/response schemas for all your APIs and automatically generates high-quality API Documentation.

• Generated Frontend Clients: Automatically generate type-safe API clients to integrate with your frontend.

Encore is designed to help developers and teams be incredibly productive, and have more fun, when solving most backend use cases. Many teams are already using Encore to build things like:

• CRUD backends and REST APIs for SaaS products.
• Large microservices backends for advanced web and mobile apps.
• High-performance APIs serving advanced business logic to 3rd parties.
• And much more...

The Encore framework, parser, compiler, and CLI are all Open Source. An Encore account is required in order for Encore Platform to be able to orchestrate distributed tracing, secrets management, and deploying your application to cloud enviornments.

Creating an Encore account is free, and the Encore Platform comes with a free built-in development cloud to help you get started.

• Deploy your first app in minutes with the Quick Start Guide.
• Check out the Open Source Example Applications repo for inspiration on what to build.

Developers building with Encore are forward-thinkers who want to focus on creative programming and building great software to solve meaningful problems. It's a friendly place, great for exchanging ideas and learning new things! Join the conversation on Slack.

We rely on your contributions and feedback to improve Encore for everyone who is using it. Here's how you can contribute:

• ⭐ Star and watch this repository to help spread the word and stay up to date.
• Share your ideas and ask questions on Discourse.
• Meet fellow Encore developers and chat on Slack.
• Follow Encore on Twitter.
• Share feedback or ask questions via email.
• Leave feedback on the Public Roadmap.
• Send a pull request here on GitHub with your contribution.

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Encore was founded by long-time backend engineers from Spotify, Google and Monzo with over 50 years of collective experience. We’ve lived through the challenges of building complex distributed systems with thousands of services, and scaling to hundreds of millions of users.

Encore grew out of these experiences and is a solution to the frustrations that came with them: unnecessary crippling complexity and constant repetition of undifferentiated work that suffocates the developer’s creativity. With Encore, we want to set developers free to achieve their creative potential.

For individual developers building for the cloud, Encore provides a radically improved experience. With Encore you’re able to stay in the flowstate and experience the joy and creativity of building.

For startup teams who need to build a scalable backend to support the growth of their product, Encore lets them get up and running in the cloud within minutes. It lets them focus on solving the needs of their users, instead of spending most of their time re-solving the everyday challenges of building distributed systems in the cloud.

For teams in mature organizations that want to focus on innovating and building new features, Encore lets them stop spending time on operations and onboarding new team members. Using Encore for new feature development is easy, just spin up a new backend service in a few minutes.

Encore is the only tool that understands what you’re building. The Encore framework, coupled with static analysis, lets the Encore Platform deeply understand the application you’re building. This enables the Platform to provide a unique developer experience that helps you stay in the flow as you’re building. For instance you don't need to bother with configuring and managing infrastructure, setting up environments and keeping them in sync, or writing documentation and drafting architecture diagrams. Encore does all of this automatically out of the box.

Unlike many tools that aim to only make cloud deployment easier, Encore is not a cloud hosting provider. With Encore, you can use your own cloud account with all the major cloud providers: AWS/Azure/GCP. This means you’re in control of your data and can maintain your trust relationship with your cloud provider. You can also use Encore's development cloud for free, with pretty generous "fair use" limits.

We've found that to meaningfully improve the developer experience, you have to operate across the full stack. Unless you understand how an application is deployed, there are a large number of things in the development process that you can't simplify. That's why so many other developer tools have such a limited impact. With Encore's more integrated approach, we're able to unlock a radically better experience for developers.

Encore has been designed to let you go outside of the framework when you want to, and easily drop down in abstraction level when you need to. This means you're not likely to run into any "dead ends".

If you really do want to migrate away, it's relatively easy to do. Because when you build an Encore application, the vast majority of code is just plain Go. So in practice, the amount of code specific to Encore is very small.

Encore has built-in support for ejecting your application as a way of removing the connection to the Encore Platform. Ejecting your app produces a standalone Docker image that can be deployed anywhere you'd like, and can help facilitate the migration away according to the process above.

Migrating away is also very low risk, since Encore deploys to your own cloud account from the start, so there's never any data to migrate.

Open Source also plays a role. Encore's code generation, compiler, and parser are all open source and can be used however you want. So if you run into something unforeseen down the line, you have free access to the tools you might need.

And since Encore is about building distributed systems, it's quite straightforward to use it in combination with other backends that aren't built with Encore. So if you come across a use case where Encore for some reason doesn't fit, you won't need to tear everything up and start from scratch. You can just build that specific part without Encore.

It's our belief that adopting Encore is a low-risk decision, given it needs no initial investment in foundational work. The ambition is to simply add a lot of value to your everyday development process, from day one.

See CONTRIBUTING.md.