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This project is an incubation project being run inside the Green Software Foundation; as such, we DON’T recommend using it in any critical use case. Incubation projects are experimental, offer no support guarantee, have minimal governance and process, and may be retired at any moment. This project may one day Graduate, in which case this disclaimer will be removed.

Quick start

This page will provide the basic instructions for getting up and running with Impact Framework.

1: Install Impact Framework​

Install the Impact Framework globally using npm.

npm install -g @grnsft/if

Read our detailed guide to installing IF.

2: Create a manifest file​

A manifest file contains all the configuration and input data required to measure your application's energy and carbon impacts and should have a .yml extension.

Open the file, add your data and save the file. The minimal example below runs two snapshot observations through a single plugin - all it does is multiply a value in each element of the input data by 2.

name: basic-demo
description:
tags:
initialize:
  plugins:
    double-a-value: 
      path: 'builtin'
      method: Coefficient
      config:
        input-parameter: "cpu/utilization"
        coefficient: 2
        output-parameter: "cpu-utilization-doubled"

tree:
  children:
    child-0:
      defaults:
        cpu/thermal-design-power: 100
      pipeline:
        observe:
        regroup:
        compute:
          - double-a-value
      inputs:
        - timestamp: 2023-07-06T00:00
          duration: 1
          cpu/utilization: 20
        - timestamp: 2023-07-06T00:01
          duration: 1
          cpu/utilization: 80

Read our detailed guides to writing manifest files.

3: Compute your manifest file​

Run the pipeline by passing the path to your manifest file to the if-run command line tool:

if-run --manifest <path-to-your-manifest>

The output will be printed to the console.

🎉Congratulations 🎉! You have just used the Impact Framework to compute a manifest file! Your challenge now is to use these principles to construct manifest files for real applications. Our docs will help!

Next steps​

Now you know how to use the if-run you can start building more complex pipelines of plugins and more complicated manifest files. Your overall aim is to create a manifest file that accurately represents a real software application, and a plugin pipeline that yields an environmental metric that's important to you (e.g. carbon).

Experiment by adding more plugins to the pipeline and observe how each plugin enriches each element in the inputs array with new values.

You can also configure if to save your output data to another yaml file. To do this, add the --output flag and the path to the output file where the results are saved.

The command is then as follows:

if-run --manifest <path-to-your-impl> --output <save-path>

Explore our user documentation for walkthrough guides to common Impact Framework tasks: