Droplet

The Droplet is a service container that gives you access to many of Vapor's facilities. It is responsible for registering routes, starting the server, appending middleware, and more.

Initialization

As you have probably already seen, the only thing required to create an instance of Droplet is to import Vapor.

import Vapor

let drop = Droplet()

// your magic here

drop.run()

Creation of the Droplet normally happens in the main.swift file.

Environment

The environment property contains the current environment your application is running in. Usually development, testing, or production.

if drop.environment == .production {
    ...
}

The environment affects Config and Logging. The environment is development by default. To change it, pass the --env= flag as an argument.

vapor run serve --env=production

If you are in Xcode, you can pass arguments through the scheme editor.

Note: Debug logs can reduce the number of requests your application can handle per second. Enabling the production environment can improve performance.

Working Directory

The workDir property contains a path to the current working directory of the application relative to where it was started. By default, this property assumes you started the Droplet from its root directory.

drop.workDir // "/var/www/my-project/"

You can override the working directory through the Droplet's initializer, or by passing the --workdir argument.

vapor run serve --workdir="/var/www/my-project"

Modifying Properties

The Droplet's properties can be changed programmatically or through configuration.

Programmatic

Properties on the Droplet can be changed after it is initialized.

let drop = Droplet()

drop.server = MyServerType.self

Here the type of server the Droplet uses is changed to a custom type. When the Droplet is run, this custom server type will be booted instead of the default server.

Configurable

If you want to modify a property of the Droplet only in certain cases, you can use addConfigurable. Say for example you want to email error logs to yourself in production, but you don't want to spam your inbox while developing.

let drop = Droplet()

drop.addConfigurable(log: MyEmailLogger.self, name: "email")

The Droplet will continue to use the default logger until you modify the Config/droplet.json file to point to your email logger. If this is done in Config/production/droplet.json, then your logger will only be used in production.

{
    "log": "email"
}

Initialization

The Droplet init method is fairly simple since most properties are variable and can be changed after initialization.

Most plugins for Vapor come with a Provider, these take care of configuration details for you.

Droplet(
    arguments: [String]?,
    workDir workDirProvided: String?,
    config configProvided: Config?,
    localization localizationProvided: Localization?,
)

Note: Remember that the Droplet's properties are initialized with usable defaults. This means that if you change a property, you must be sure to change it before other parts of your code use it. Otherwise, you may end up with confusing results as the defaults are used sometimes, and your overrides are used other times.