How can I specify where my local developer's service fabric cluster is created?

Question

My problem: I am learning Service Fabric, and doing simple tutorials, and the local cluster is filling up my C drive. I run the projects in Visual Studio. It first creates a clu

Answer 1

You can set up a local cluster pointing to a non-system drive by running the DevClusterSetup script in PowerShell. You can find the script under %programfiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Service Fabric\ClusterSetup\. The command line you want is:

.\DevClusterSetup.ps1 -PathToClusterDataRoot <desired_app_and_data_location> -PathToClusterLogRoot <desired_tracelog_location>

If you already have a cluster running, this script will remove it and create a new one (note that this will delete any deployed apps and their data). Once you have the new cluster running, Visual Studio will automatically use that when you deploy locally.

As for the file sizes - this is mostly due to the log file used for replication of state stored in reliable collections. A large, sparse file is preallocated up-front, which is why you see a difference between size and size on disk. We are planning to make these values configurable so that they can be dialed down on local clusters.

Answer 2

What you also can do is resetting the local cluster once in a while.

Can be easily done using the Service Fabric Local Cluster Manager application:

Answer 3

In the Service Fabric SDK folder (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\ServiceFabric), you will find a ClusterSetup folder.

In there you will find ClusterManifestTemplate.json files for the different configurations of the local cluster. These are json configuration files used by the powershell scripts that create and manage the local service fabric cluster.

At the bottom of these files, in "fabricSettings" it is setting the value of the FabricDataRoot and FabricLogRoot, based on the "%systemDrive%". If you replace this by "D:" it should result in a local cluster on the D drive.

After making these changes, I stopped my local fabric, deleted the current fabric folders from my C drive, and rebooted my machine. When I then start a debug session in VS.2017, it creates the local dev fabric on my D drive and deploys the application to that location. (I do notice that some empty folders are created on my C drive but these are not used.)