This section describes a typical workflow for developing the CORD control plane. This workflow does not include any data plane elements (e.g., the underlying switching fabric or access devices).
It is straightforward to set up a local Kubernetes environment on your laptop. The recommended way to do this is to use Minikube. This guide assumes you have done that. See the Single-Node case in the Installation Guide for more information, or you can go directly to the documentation for Minikube: https://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/minikube/#installation
Note: If you are going to do development on Minikube you may want to increase its memory from the default 512MB. You can do this using this command to start Minikube:
minikube start --cpus 2 --memory 4096
In addition to Minikube running on your laptop, you will also need to install Helm: https://docs.helm.sh/using_helm/#installing-helm.
Once both Helm and Minikube are installed, you can deploy the core components of XOS, along with the services that make up, for example, the R-CORD profile. This uses images published on DockerHub:
cd ~/cord/helm-charts
In this folder you can choose from the different charts which one to deploy. For example to deploy R-CORD you can follow this guide
Some profiles require a kafka message bus to work properly. If you need to deploy it for development purposes, a single instance deployment will be enough. You can do so as follows:
helm repo add incubator http://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-charts-incubator install --name cord-kafka incubator/kafka -f examples/kafka-single.yaml
Assuming you have downloaded the CORD source code and the entire source tree for CORD is under ~/cord, you can edit and re-deploy the code as follows.
Note: To develop a single synchronizer you may not need the full CORD source, but this assume that you have a good knowledge of the system and you know what you’re doing.
First you will need to point Docker to the one provided by Minikube (note that you don’t need to have docker installed, as it comes with the Minikube installation).
eval $(minikube docker-env)
You will then need to build the containers from source:
cd ~/cord/automation-tools/developer python imagebuilder.py -f ../../helm-charts/examples/filter-images.yaml -x
At this point, the images containing your changes will be available in the Docker environment used by Minikube.
Note: In some cases you can rebuild a single docker image to make the process faster, but this assume that you have a good knowledge of the system and you know what you’re doing.
All that is left is to teardown and re-deploy the containers.
helm del --purge <chart-name> helm dep update <cart-name> helm install <chart-name> -n <chart-name> -f examples/image-tag-candidate.yaml -f examples/imagePullPolicy-IfNotPresent.yaml
In some cases it is possible to use the helm upgrade command, but if you made changes to the XOS models we suggest you redeploy everything.
Note: if your changes are only in the synchronizer steps, after rebuilding the containers, you can just delete the corresponding POD and kubernetes will restart it with the new image.
If you have a remote POD that you want to test your changes on, you need to push your docker images to a docker registry that can be accessed from the POD.
The way we recommend doing this is via a private docker registry. You can find more informations about what a docker registry is in the offline installation section.
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