aks-engine/docs/community/developer-guide.md

Developer Guide

This guide explains how to set up your environment for development on AKS Engine.

Prerequisites

• git
• go 1.14.4 or later
• dep 0.5.1 or later
• An Azure subscription
• kubectl

Contribution Guidelines

We welcome contributions. This project has set up some guidelines in order to ensure that (a) code quality remains high, (b) the project remains consistent, and (c) contributions follow the open source legal requirements. Our intent is not to burden contributors, but to build elegant and high-quality open source code so that our users will benefit.

Make sure you have read and understood the main CONTRIBUTING guide:

https://github.com/Azure/aks-engine/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

Build AKS Engine from Source

Docker Development Environment

The easiest way to start hacking on AKS Engine is to use a Docker-based environment. If you already have Docker installed then you can get started with a few commands.

$ make dev

Or on Windows (ensure Docker is configured for Linux containers on Windows):

powershell ./makedev.ps1

This make target mounts the AKS Engine source directory as a volume into the Docker container, which means you can edit your source code in your favorite editor on your machine, while still being able to compile and test inside of the Docker container. This environment mirrors the environment used in the AKS Engine continuous integration (CI) system.

When make dev completes, you will be left at a command prompt inside a Docker container.

Run the following commands to pull the latest dependencies and build the aks-engine tool.

# set up the hack/tools directory for your platform
make -C hack/tools clean install
# install and download build dependencies
make bootstrap
# build the `aks-engine` binary
make build

The build process leaves the compiled aks-engine binary in the bin directory. Make sure everything completed successfully by running bin/aks-engine without any arguments:

$ ./bin/aks-engine
Usage:
  aks-engine [flags]
  aks-engine [command]

Available Commands:
  addpool       Add a node pool to an existing AKS Engine-created Kubernetes cluster
  completion    Generates bash completion scripts
  deploy        Deploy an Azure Resource Manager template
  generate      Generate an Azure Resource Manager template
  get-logs      Collect logs and current cluster nodes configuration.
  get-versions  Display info about supported Kubernetes versions
  help          Help about any command
  rotate-certs  Rotate certificates on an existing AKS Engine-created Kubernetes cluster
  scale         Scale an existing AKS Engine-created Kubernetes cluster
  update        Update an existing AKS Engine-created VMSS node pool
  upgrade       Upgrade an existing AKS Engine-created Kubernetes cluster
  version       Print the version of aks-engine

Flags:
      --debug                enable verbose debug logs
  -h, --help                 help for aks-engine
      --show-default-model   Dump the default API model to stdout

Use "aks-engine [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Here's a quick demo video showing the dev/build/test cycle with this setup.

Building on Windows, OSX, and Linux

If the above docker container conveniences don't work for your developer environment, below is per-platform guidance to help you set up your local dev environment manually to build an aks-engine binary from source.

Building an aks-engine binary from source has a few requirements for each of the platforms. Download and install the prerequisites for your platform: Windows, Linux, or Mac:

Windows

Setup steps:

• Setup your go workspace. This guide assumes you are using c:\Users\me\code\go as your Go workspace:

  1. Type WIN+R to open the run prompt
  2. Type rundll32 sysdm.cpl,EditEnvironmentVariables to open the system variables
  3. Add c:\go\bin and c:\Users\me\code\go\bin to your PATH variables
  4. Click "new" and add new environment variable named GOPATH and set the value to c:\Users\me\code\go

• Build aks-engine:

  1. Type Windows key-R to open the run prompt
  2. Type cmd to open a command prompt
  3. Type mkdir %GOPATH% to create your gopath
  4. Type cd %GOPATH%
  5. Type mkdir -p src\github.com\Azure to create the gopath to aks-engine
  6. Type cd src\github.com\Azure
  7. Type git clone https://github.com/Azure/aks-engine to download aks-engine from GitHub
  8. Type cd aks-engine
  9. Type make bootstrap to get the supporting components
  10. Type make to build the project
  11. Run .\bin\aks-engine.exe to see the command line parameters

OS X and Linux

Setup steps:

1. Open a command prompt to setup your gopath:
2. mkdir $HOME/go
3. Edit $HOME/.bash_profile and add the following lines to setup your go path:

   export GOPATH=$HOME/go
   export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin:$GOPATH/bin
   

4. source $HOME/.bash_profile

Build aks-engine:

1. Type mkdir -p $HOME/go/src/github.com/Azure to create your gopath
2. Type cd $_ to switch directories to that same path
3. Type git clone https://github.com/Azure/aks-engine to download aks-engine from GitHub
4. Type cd aks-engine to change to the source directory
5. Type make bootstrap to install supporting components
6. Type make to build the project
7. Type ./bin/aks-engine to see the command line parameters

Structure of the Code

The code for the AKS Engine project is organized as follows:

• The individual programs are located in cmd/. Code inside of cmd/ is not designed for library re-use.
• Shared libraries are stored in pkg/.
• The tests/ directory contains a number of utility scripts. Most of these are used by the CI/CD pipeline.
• The docs/ folder is used for documentation and examples.

Go dependencies are managed with Golang Dep and stored in the vendor/ directory.

Git Conventions

We use Git for our version control system. The master branch is the home of the current development candidate. Releases are tagged.

We accept changes to the code via GitHub Pull Requests (PRs). One workflow for doing this is as follows:

1. Use go get to clone the aks-engine repository: go get github.com/Azure/aks-engine
2. Fork that repository into your GitHub account
3. Add your repository as a remote for $GOPATH/github.com/Azure/aks-engine
4. Create a new working branch (git checkout -b feat/my-feature) and do your work on that branch.
5. When you are ready for us to review, push your branch to GitHub, and then open a new pull request with us.

Third Party Dependencies

Third party dependencies reside locally inside the repository under the vendor/ directory. We use dep to enforce our dependency graph, declared in Gopkg.toml in the project root.

If you wish to introduce a new third party dependency into aks-engine, please file an issue, and include the canonical VCS path (e.g., github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-go) along with either the desired release string expression to depend on (e.g., ~8.1.0), or the commit hash to pin to a static commit (e.g., 4cdb38c072b86bf795d2c81de50784d9fdd6eb77). A project maintainer will then own the effort to update the codebase with that dependency, including relevant updates to Gopkg.toml and vendor/.

As a rule we want to distinguish dependency update PRs from feature/bug PRs; we may ask that feature/bug PRs which include updates to vendor/ and/or contain any other dependency-related overhead to be triaged into separate PRs that can be managed independently, pre-requisite dependency changes in one, and features/bugs in another. The objective of enforcing these distinctions is to help focus the PR review process, and to make manageable the difficult task of rationalizing a multitude of parallel PRs in flight, many of which which may carry hard-to-reconcile dependency side-effects when aggressively updated with a fresh dependency graph as part of the PR payload.

Go Conventions

We follow the Go coding style standards very closely. Typically, running go fmt will make your code beautiful for you.

We also typically follow the conventions recommended by go lint and gometalinter. Run make test-style to test the style conformance.

Read more:

• Effective Go introduces formatting.
• The Go Wiki has a great article on formatting.

Unit Tests

Unit tests may be run locally via make test.

End-to-end Tests

AKS Engine maintains its own E2E test implementation (see the test/e2e/ source directory) to validate Kubernetes on Azure functionality from AKS Engine source.

A make target convenience is maintained to easily run these tests:

$ make test-kubernetes

In practice, running E2E tests locally requires lots of environmental context, in order to tell the E2E runner what kind of cluster configuration you want to test, which tests you may want to run or skip, what level of timeout tolerance to permit, and many other runtime-configurable options that express the exact test criteria you intend to validate. A real-world E2E invocation may look this this instead:

$ ORCHESTRATOR_RELEASE=1.22 CLUSTER_DEFINITION=examples/kubernetes.json SUBSCRIPTION_ID=$TEST_AZURE_SUB_ID CLIENT_ID=$TEST_AZURE_SP_ID CLIENT_SECRET=$TEST_AZURE_SP_PW TENANT_ID=$TEST_AZURE_TENANT_ID LOCATION=$TEST_AZURE_REGION CLEANUP_ON_EXIT=false make test-kubernetes

Thorough guidance around effectively running E2E tests to validate source code changes can be found here.

Debugging

To debug AKS Engine code directly, use the Go extension for Visual Studio Code or use Delve at the command line.

Visual Studio Code

To debug AKS Engine with VS Code, first ensure that you have the Go extension installed. Click the "Extensions" icon in the Activity Bar (on the far left), search for "go", then install the official Microsoft extension titled "Rich Go language support for Visual Studio Code."

Once installed, the Go extension will go get several helper applications, including Delve for debugging support. You can read more about VS Code integration with Delve here.

Open the directory that you checked out the aks-engine repo to in VS Code.

Debugging Tests

If you are writing tests (and if you are, we want to give you a hug!), you can debug them directly in Visual Studio code.

Set a breakpoint inside a test, then move your mouse pointer to the top of the function definition. To the right of "run test" appears a link saying "debug test": click it!

Debugging AKS Engine

To debug changes to AKS Engine source during active development, the default Go debugging configuration in .vscode/launch.json needs to be edited. Open that file (or just click the gear-shaped "Open launch.json" icon if you have the Debug panel open).

Here is an example launch.json file that contains a configuration for debugging the aks-engine generate command using the examples/kubernetes.json file for its cluster configuration.

{
  "version": "0.2.0",
  "configurations": [
    {
      "name": "aks-engine generate",
      "type": "go",
      "request": "launch",
      "mode": "debug",
      "program": "${workspaceRoot}",
      "env": {},
      "args": [
        "generate", "--api-model=${workspaceRoot}/examples/kubernetes.json",
        "--set", "masterProfile.dnsPrefix=my-dns-prefix",
        "--set", "linuxProfile.ssh.publicKeys[0].keyData=my-public-key-contents",
        "--set", "servicePrincipalProfile.clientId=my-service-principal-client-id",
        "--set", "servicePrincipalProfile.secret=my-service-principal-secret"
      ],
      "showLog": true
    }
  ]
}

Copy and paste the configuration and change the values in the --set arguments to reference your details. You can create multiple configurations in launch.json to debug aks-engine upgrade, scale, and other commands.

For a more detailed debugging configuration, check out the example launch.json in this directory. It assumes you have $CLIENT_ID, $CLIENT_SECRET, and $AKSE_PUB_KEY environment variables set, and will prompt you for other command inputs when starting the debugger.

The .vscode/launch.json file is ignored by git, so your local version won't be overwritten when you push or pull changes.

To start debugging, set a breakpoint in the code of interest. Then choose your configuration in the Debug panel and click the green "Start Debugging" arrow.

Next Steps for Debugging

When the debugger hits your breakpoint, the variables and call stack will populate in the Debug panel. Now you can step through code and inspect memory at runtime using Visual Studio Code's standard debugging controls.

This just scratches the surface. Please read more about debugging with VS Code.

CLI

To debug aks-engine generate from the command line:

dlv debug github.com/Azure/aks-engine -- generate ~/Documents/azure/kubernetes.json

To test an individual package or a single test:

dlv test github.com/Azure/aks-engine/pkg/engine
dlv test github.com/Azure/aks-engine/pkg/engine -- -test.run ^TestNetworkPolicyDefaults$

Test pipeline

AKS Engine employs a Continuous Integration (CI) system that incorporates Azure DevOps, configured to interact with the AKS Engine GitHub project.

The following steps constitute the AKS Engine CI pipeline:

1. Contributor opens a Pull Request (PR) against the AKS Engine project
2. An AKS Engine team member comments on the PR to trigger an Azure DevOps job that
   • applies the changes to the HEAD of the master branch
   • runs unit tests and code coverage reports
   • generates multiple ARM templates for different deployment scenarios
   • simultaneously provisions the clusters based on generated templates in Azure
3. The PR is code reviewed by the members of AKS Engine team
4. Once the PR is approved and the end-to-end job has passed, the PR can now be merged into the master branch
5. Once merged, another job is triggered to verify integrity of the master branch. This job is similar to the PR job.

Pull Requests and Generated Code

To make it easier use AKS Engine source code as a library and to go get github.com/Azure/aks-engine, some generated Go code is committed to the repository. Your pull request may need to regenerate those files before it will pass the required make ensure-generated step.

Always run make build before you submit a pull request to validate compilation and generated code hygiene. Run make ensure-generated yourself to validate that things check out. If there are discrepencies, make ensure-generated will output a brief error report.

What is generated?

• Changes under the parts/ folder require the pkg/engine/templates_generated.go file to be updated.
• Changes under pkg/i8n/translations require the pkg/engine/translations_generated.go file to be updated.