A tinsmith, in Blacksmith Services parlance, is a Cloud Foundry Service Broker that runs as a Cloud Foundry Application, consumes a provisioned, on-demand Blacksmith Service, and makes it available to the rest of the world as a shared, multi-tenant service.

A picture may make things clearer:

This Tinsmith, in particular, takes a dedicated MariaDB instance (most likely deployed via the MariaDB Blacksmith Forge) and carves up the dedicated host / cluster into individual databases for each service. Bound applications will have free run of their own database, but will be unable to interact with other shared databases on the same installation.

To deploy this Tinsmith, you need the code, a Cloud Foundry, and a MariaDB service from your CF Marketplace. We heartily recommend a service deployed via the Blacksmith and its MariaDB Forge, but any service that is tagged mariadb, and provides the host, port (as a number), username and password fields in its $VCAP_SERVICES credentials block should do.

git clone https://github.com/blacksmith-community/cf-mariadb-tinsmith
cd cf-mariadb-tinsmith

# push the code...
cf push --no-start
cf bind-service mariadb-tinsmith YOUR-DATABASE-SERVICE

# you may want to set some other environment variables at
# this stage; see "Configuration", below.
cf set-env mariadb-tinsmith SB_BROKER_USERNAME my-broker
cf set-env mariadb-tinsmith SB_BROKER_PASSWORD a-secret

# start the app
cf start mariadb-tinsmith

# register this tinsmith as a service broker in CF
cf create-service-broker mariadb-tinsmith my-broker a-secret \
  https://mariadb-tinsmith.$APP_DOMAIN
cf enable-service-access mariadb

# marvel at your handiwork
cf marketplace

This tinsmith is configured entirely through environment variables.

There are environment variables for governing the presentation of this brokers service / plan in the marketplace:

• $SERVICE_ID - The internal ID of the service that this broker provides to the marketplace.
• $SERVICE_NAME - The CLI-friendly name of the service.
• $PLAN_ID - The internal ID of the plan that this broker provides to the marketplace.
• $DESCRIPTION - A human-friendly description of the service / plan, to be displayed in the marketplace
• $TAGS - A comma-separated list of tags to apply to instances of the service.

There are environment variables for controlling the security and authentication parameters of the broker:

• $SB_BROKER_USERNAME - The HTTP Basic Auth username that must be used to access this broker. Defaults to b-mariadb.
• $SB_BROKER_PASSWORD - The HTTP Basic Auth password that must be used to access this broker. Defaults to mariadb.

You can also override the service selection logic and force it to pick a specific, named service by setting the $USE_SERVICE environment variable to its name. Otherwise, the broker will look for bound services that are tagged mariadb.