This repository contains the Google Cloud Bigtable emulator, which is an in memory Go implementation of Bigtable allowing to create integration tests and a local development environment. Warning: this is not a production tool.

The emulator is offered in the Google Cloud SDK. However, it might be difficult or overkill to install the SDK on every development and CI box. In those situations, this image provides a lightweight alternative (< 17MB). It also provides an easy way to setup necessary tables and column families at startup.

To start it, run the following command:

docker run -d -p 9035:9035 shopify/bigtable-emulator

You can specify the tables and column families you need using the -cf switch. The format is a comma separated list of <instance>.<table>.<column family>. Ex:

docker run -d -p 9035:9035 shopify/bigtable-emulator -cf dev.records.data,dev.records.metadata

You have to set the BIGTABLE_EMULATOR_HOST environment variable to the right docker host and container port (localhost:9035 in most cases). Then:

import (
  "cloud.google.com/go/bigtable"
  "golang.org/x/net/context"
  "golang.org/x/oauth2"
  "google.golang.org/api/option"
)

type devTokenSource struct{}

func (devTokenSource) Token() (*oauth2.Token, error) {
  return new(oauth2.Token), nil
}

func NewDevBigTableClient() (*bigtable.Client, error) {
  ctx := context.Background()
  project := "dev"
  instance := "dev"
  return bigtable.NewClient(
    ctx, 
    project, 
    instance,
    option.WithTokenSource(&devTokenSource{}),
  )
}

This software is available under the MIT license (see 'LICENSE' file for more details).