Docs: Getting Set Up for Spinnaker Development

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

This page describes the steps a Developer should take to fetch Spinnaker’s codebase and get set up to work on it.

Follow the contributing guidelines if you plan to submit your work as a patch to the open source project.

System Requirements

This guide assumes you have access to a machine with a minimum specification of:

At least 16 GB of RAM
At least 6 cores CPU

MacOS

These are some tools but install additional as needed the tools for your needs

homebrew: Not required but useful - can be installed via here
Docker: either docker desktop or rancher. CAUTION: Spinnaker uses TestContainers heavily and you’ll potentially need to adjust settings for test containers which is out of the scope of this guide.
git: Installed usually via Xcode Command Line Tools - often by trying to run git from a terminal
curl: brew install curl - not required explicitly but useful for testing
JDK 17: A JDK is required since we’re building from source. This can be done using sdkman or any other installation tool.
node/npm: (version >=16)
yarn: npm install -g yarn or guide
mysql: docker run -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=changeit -it --rm mysql:8 --verbose is a good basic example but will need the databases configured as documented in the storage configuration . Adjust the docker command to persist if you want to keep your data between runs.
redis: docker run -d --rm --name redis -p 0.0.0.0:6379:6739 valkey/valkey:8 as an example.
Set up your cloud provider of choice . Locally these providers would be added to ~/.spinnaker/clouddriver-local.yml files
Add the other sql/redis/other configuration to your ~/.spinnaker/*.yml files for development

Next, clone the spinnaker monorepo . You can now start spinnaker assuming you’ve configured the necessary settings locally for sql/redis.

cd spinnaker
./gradlew run

This starts up ALL the spinnaker services service via a single gradle task. Services can be started independently as needed. Keep in mind that there is a dependency tree for services that will mean that things won’t start unless a dependent service is up and running. Front50 is a common base service dependency for all the other spinnaker services.

Making Changes to Spinnaker

Once you have a working LocalGit deployment you can begin to make changes to the codebase. After you’ve made edits in the code of a service you can see those changes reflected by restarting the services as needed.

Configuring an IDE

IntelliJ

Import the project into IntelliJ:

Select New > Project from Existing Sources
Navigating to the build.gradle file (i.e., ~/dev/spinnaker/build.gradle)

Debugging

Each Java service can be configured to listen for a debugger. To start the JVM in debug mode, set the Java system property DEBUG=true.

The JVM will then listen for a debugger to be attached on a port specific to that service. The service-specific debug ports are as follows:

Service	Port
Gate	8184
Orca	8183
Clouddriver	7102
Front50	8180
Rosco	8187
Igor	8188
Echo	8189

The JVM will not wait for the debugger to be attached before starting a service; the relevant JVM arguments can be seen and modified as needed in the service’s build.gradle file.

Next steps

If you haven’t done so already, read through the Spinnaker Architecture reference to learn more about the individual services’ responsibilities, their dependencies on each other, and their port mappings.
Consider working on one of the issues marked “beginner-friendly” to start learning and contributing to Spinnaker right away.
Sign up for Spinnaker’s Slack community and join the #dev channel to ask questions and get feedback while developing Spinnaker.
Read through the New Stage guide to add new stages and steps
Read about extending spinnaker with CRD handling

Spinnaker – Development Environment