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Developing Ambassador

Ambassador is a complex piece of software with lots of integrations and moving parts. Just being able to build the code and run tests is often not sufficient to work efficiently on a given piece of the code. This document functions as a central registry for how to efficiently hack on any part of ambassador.

How do I get ambassador without building it?

Check out https://www.getambassador.io/!

How do I get help with any of this stuff?

Ask on our Slack channel in the #ambassador-dev channel.

How do I setup a system for ambassador development?

To build or hack on ambassador, there are a number of prerequisites. In general our tooling tries to detect any missing requirements and provide a friendly error message. If you ever find that this is not the case please file a PR with a fix. Likewise if you ever find anything missing from this list.

Requirements:

  • git
  • make
  • docker (make sure you can run docker commands as your dev user without sudo)
  • bash
  • rsync (with the --info option)
  • golang 1.13
  • python 3.7+
  • kubectl
  • a kubernetes cluster
  • a docker registry

Configuration:

  • export DEV_REGISTRY=<your-dev-docker-registry> (you need to be logged in and have permission to push)
  • export DEV_KUBECONFIG=<your-dev-kubeconfig> (your cluster needs to be able to read from your registry, specifically from the ambassador, kat-server, and kat-client repos)
  • export GCLOUD_CONFIG=<your-config> (only needed if your kubeconfig uses gcloud, which is likely for a GKE cluster)

Please note that ambassador tests and build system will do destructive things to your development cluster. We therefore recommend that you create a separate kubeconfig file dedicated for ambassador development and point DEV_KUBECONFIG to this file instead of using the default ~/.kube/config location.

How do I find out what build targets are available?

Use make help and make targets to see what build targets are available along with documentation for what each target does.

How do I build an ambassador image from source?

On your machine

  1. git clone https://github.com/datawire/ambassador.git && cd ambassador
  2. make images (this will take a while the first time)

The ambassador image will be tagged as ambassador:latest. There will also be a kat-server:latest and a kat-client:latest image. These two images are only used for testing.

Within a docker container

  1. docker pull docker:latest
  2. docker run --rm -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -it docker:latest sh
  3. apk add --update --no-cache bash build-base go curl rsync python3 python2 git
  4. git clone https://github.com/datawire/ambassador.git && cd ambassador
  5. make images

Steps 0 and 1 are run on your machine, and 2 - 4 are from within the docker container. The base image is a "Docker in Docker" image, ran with -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock in order to connect to your local daemon from the docker inside the container. More info on Docker in Docker here.

The images will be created and tagged as defined above, and will be available in docker on your local machine.

How do I push an ambassador image from source?

  1. export DEV_REGISTRY=<your-dev-docker-registry> (you need to be logged in and have permission to push)
  2. make push
  3. The output will contain the image names. You can also display this using make env or make export. The latter form is suitable for passing to bash.

NOTE: This will also push the kat-client and kat-server images.

How do I deploy an ambassador to a cluster from source?

XXX: This does not work yet, but will be fixed in a future commit!!!

  1. export DEV_REGISTRY=<your-dev-docker-registry> (you need to be logged in and have permission to push)
  2. export DEV_KUBECONFIG=<your-dev-kubeconfig>
  3. make deploy

How do I run ambassador tests?

  • export DEV_REGISTRY=<your-dev-docker-registry> (you need to be logged in and have permission to push)
  • export DEV_KUBECONFIG=<your-dev-kubeconfig>
Group Command
All Tests make test
All Golang make gotest
All Python make pytest
Some/One Golang make gotest GOTEST_PKGS=./cmd/edgectl GOTEST_ARGS="-run TestName"
Some/One Python make pytest PYTEST_ARGS="-k TestName"

Please note the python tests use a local cache to speed up test results. If you make a code update that changes the generated envoy configuration, those tests will fail and you will need to update the python test cache.

Note that it is invalid to run one of the main[Plain.*] Python tests without running all of the other main[Plain*] tests; the test will fail to run (not even showing up as a failure or xfail--it will fail to run at all). For example, PYTEST_ARGS="-k WebSocket" would match the main[Plain.WebSocketMapping-GRPC] test, and that test would fail to run; one should instead say PYTEST_ARGS="-k Plain or WebSocket" to avoid breaking the sub-tests of "Plain".

How do I update the python test cache?

  • First, run make KAT_RUN_MODE=envoy pytest to do a test run without using the local cache.

  • Once that succeeds, use make pytest-gold to update the cache from the passing tests.

My editor is changing go.mod or go.sum, should I commit that?

If you notice this happening, run make go-mod-tidy, and commit that.

(If you're in Datawire, you should do this from apro/, not apro/ambassador/, so that apro.git's files are included too.)

How do I run ambassador for local development using the new entrypoint?

The new entrypoint is written in go. It strives to be as compatible as possible with the normal go toolchain. You should be able to run it with:

go run ./cmd/busyambassador entrypoint

Of course just because you can run it this way does not mean it will succeed. The entrypoint needs to launch diagd and envoy in order to function, and it also expect to be able to write to the /ambassador directory.

Setting up diagd

If you want to hack on diagd, its easiest to setup a virtualenv with an editable copy and launch your go run from within that virtualenv. Note that these instructions depend on the virtualenvwrapper (https://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) package:

# Create a virtualenv named amb with all the python requirements
# installed.
mkvirtualenv -p python3 -r builder/requirements.txt amb
# Created an editable installation of ambassador:
pip install -e python/
# Check that we do indeed have diagd in our path.
which diagd

Changing the ambassador root

You should now be able to launch ambassador if you set the ambassador_root environment variable to a writeable location:

ambassador_root=/tmp go run ./cmd/busyambassador entrypoint

Getting envoy

If you do not have envoy in your path already, the entrypoint will use docker to run it. At the moment this is untested for macs which probably means it is broken since localhost communication does not work by default on macs. This can be made to work as soon an intrepid volunteer with a mac reaches out to me (rhs@datawire.io).

Shutting up the pod labels error

An astute observe of the logs will notice that ambassador complains voiciferously that pod labels are not mounted in the ambassador container. To reduce this noise, you can:

mkdir /tmp/ambassador-pod-info && touch /tmp/ambassador-pod-info/labels

Extra credit

When you run ambassador locally it will configure itself exactly as it would in the cluster. That means with two caveats you can actually interact with it and it will function normally:

  1. You need to run teleproxy or equivalent so it can connect to the backend services in its configuration.

  2. You need to supply the host header when you talk to it.

How do I debug/develop envoy config generation?

Envoy configuration is generated by the ambassador compiler. Debugging the ambassador compiler by running it in kubernetes is very slow since we need to push both the code and any relevant kubernetes resources into the cluster.

mockery

Fortunately we have the mockery tool which lets us run the compiler code directly on kubernetes resources without having to push that code or the relevant kubernetes resources into the cluster. This is the fastest way to hack on and debug the compiler.

The mockery tool runs inside the Docker container used to build Ambassador, using make shell, so it's important to realize that it won't have access to your entire filesystem. There are two easy ways to arrange to get data in and out of the container:

  1. If you make sync, everything in the Ambassador source tree gets rsync'd into the container's /buildroot/ambassador. The first time you start the shell, this can take a bit, but after that it's pretty fast. You'll probably need to use docker cp to get data out of the container, though.

  2. You may be able to use Docker volume mounts by exporting BUILDER_MOUNTS with the appropriate -v switches before running make shell -- e.g.

    export BUILDER_MOUNTS=$(pwd)/xfer:/xfer
make shell

    will cause the dev shell to mount xfer in your current directory as /xfer. This is known to work well on MacOS (though volume mounts are slow on Mac, so moving gigabytes of data around this way isn't ideal).

Once you've sorted out how to move data around:

  1. Put together a set of Ambassador configuration CRDs in a file that's somewhere that you'll be able to get them into the builder container. The easy way to do this is to use the files you'd feed to kubectl apply; they should be actual Kubernetes objects with metadata and spec sections, etc. (If you want to use annotations, that's OK too, just put the whole Service object in there.)

  2. Run make compile shell to build everything and start the dev shell.

  3. From inside the build shell, run

    mockery $path_to_your_file

    If you're using a non-default ambassador_id you need to provide it in the environment:

    AMBASSADOR_ID=whatever mockery $path_to_your_file

    Finally, if you're trying to mimic KAT, copy the /tmp/k8s-AmbassadorTest.yaml file from a KAT run to use as input, then

    mockery --kat $kat_test_name $path_to_k8s_AmbassadorTest.yaml

    where $kat_test_name is the class name of a KAT test class, like LuaTest or TLSContextTest.

  4. Once it's done, /tmp/ambassador/snapshots will have all the output from the compiler phase of Ambassador.

The point of mockery is that it mimics the configuration cycle of real Ambassador, without relying at all on a Kubernetes cluster. This means that you can easily and quickly take a Kubernetes input and look at the generated Envoy configuration without any other infrastructure.

ambassador dump

The ambassador dump tool is also useful for debugging and hacking on the compiler. After running make shell, you'll also be able to use the ambassador CLI, which can export the most import data structures that Ambassador works with as JSON. It works from an input which can be either a single file or a directory full of files in the following formats:

  • raw Ambassador resources like you'll find in the demo/config directory; or
  • an annotated Kubernetes resources like you'll find in /tmp/k8s-AmbassadorTest.yaml after running make test; or
  • a watt snapshot like you'll find in the $AMBASSADOR_CONFIG_BASE_DIR/snapshots/snapshot.yaml (which is a JSON file, I know, it's misnamed).

Given an input source, running

ambassador dump --ir --v2 [$input_flags] $input > test.json

will dump the Ambassador IR and v2 Envoy configuration into test.json. Here $input_flags will be

  • nothing for raw Ambassador resources;
  • --k8s for Kubernetes resources; or
  • --watt for a watt snapshot.

You can get more information with

ambassador dump --help

How do I type check my python code?

Ambassador uses Python 3 type hinting and the mypy static type checker to help find bugs before runtime. If you haven't worked with hinting before, a good place to start is the mypy cheat sheet.

New code must be hinted, and the build process will verify that the type check passes when you make test. Fair warning: this means that PRs will not pass CI if the type checker fails.

We strongly recommend using an editor that can do realtime type checking (at Datawire we tend to use PyCharm and VSCode a lot, but many many editors can do this now) and also running the type checker by hand before submitting anything:

  • make mypy will start check all the Ambassador code

Since make mypy uses the daemon for caching, it should be very fast after the first run. Ambassador code should produce no warnings and no errors.

If you're concerned that the cache is somehow wrong (or if you just want the daemon to not be there any more), make mypy-clean will stop the daemon and clear the cache.

How do I make documentation-only changes?

The Ambassador documentation lives in the docs directory. If you're working on documentation for an upcoming feature or fix, make your docs changes along with your code changes, and include them all in the same PR.

If you want to make a change that only affects the live documentation for an already-released version of Ambassador, you'll need to make your changes in a branch from the release branch for that version, then PR back to the release branch. For example, if you find a typo while reading the documentation for Ambassador 1.4:

  • Check out release/v1.4
  • Make a branch from it.
  • Fix the typo.
  • Push your branch and PR it back to release/v1.4.

How do I get the source code for a release?

The current shipping release of Ambassador lives on the master branch. It is tagged with its version (e.g. v0.78.0).

Changes on master after the last tag have not been released yet, but will be included in the next release of Ambassador.

How do I make a contribution?

  1. All development must be on branches cut from master.

    • We recommend that your branches start with your username.
      • At Datawire we typically use git-flow-style naming, e.g. flynn/dev/telepathic-ui
    • Please do not use a branch name starting with release.

  2. If your development takes any significant time, merge master back into your branch regularly.

    • Think "every morning" and "right before submitting a pull request."
    • If you're using a branch name that starts with your username, git rebase is also OK and no one from Datawire will scream at you for force-pushing.
    • Please do not rebase any branch that does not start with your username.

  3. Code changes must include relevant documentation updates.

    • Make changes in the docs directory as necessary, and commit them to your branch so that they can be incorporated when the feature is merged into master.

  4. Code changes must include passing tests.

    • See python/tests/README.md for more here.
    • Your tests must actually test the change you're making.
    • Your tests must pass in order for your change to be accepted.

  5. When you have things working and tested, submit a pull request back to master.

    • Make sure your branch is up-to-date with master right before submitting the PR!
    • The PR will trigger CI to perform a build and run tests.
    • CI tests must be passing for the PR to be merged.

  6. When all is well, maintainers will merge the PR into master, accepting your change for the next Ambassador release. Thanks!

How do I make changes to the Envoy that ships with Ambassador?

This is a bit more complex than anyone likes, but here goes:

1. Preparing your machine

Building and testing Envoy can be very resource intensive. A laptop often can build Envoy... if you plug in an external hard drive, point a fan at it, and leave it running overnight and most of the next day. At Datawire, we'll often spin up a temporary build machine in GCE, so that we can build it very quickly.

As of Envoy 1.15.0, we've measure the resource use to build and test it as:

Command Disk Size Disk Used Duration[1]
make update-base 450G 12GB ~11m
make check-envoy 450G 424GB ~45m

[1] On a "Machine type: custom (32 vCPUs, 512 GB memory)" VM on GCE, with the following entry in its /etc/fstab:

tmpfs:docker  /var/lib/docker  tmpfs  size=450G  0  0

If you have the RAM, we've seen huge speed gains from doing the builds and tests on a RAM disk (see the /etc/fstab line above).

2. Setting up your workspace to hack on Envoy

  1. From your ambassador.git checkout, get Ambassador's current version of the Envoy sources, and create a branch from that:

    make $PWD/_cxx/envoy
git -C _cxx/envoy checkout -b YOUR_BRANCHNAME

  2. Tell the build system that, yes, you really would like to be compiling envoy, as you'll be modifying Envoy:

    export YES_I_AM_OK_WITH_COMPILING_ENVOY=true
export YES_I_AM_UPDATING_THE_BASE_IMAGES=true
export ENVOY_COMMIT='-'

    Building Envoy is slow, and most Ambassador contributors do not want to rebuild Envoy, so we require the first two environment variables as a safety.

    Setting ENVOY_COMMIT=- does 3 things:

    1. Tell it to use whatever is currently checked out in ./_cxx/envoy/ (instead of checking out a specific commit), so that you are free to modify those sources.
    2. Don't try to download a cached build of Envoy from a Docker cache (since it wouldn't know which ENVOY_COMMIT do download the cached build for).
    3. Don't push the build of Envoy to a Docker cache (since you're still actively working on it).

3. Hacking on Envoy

Modify the sources in ./_cxx/envoy/.

4. Building and testing your hacked-up Envoy

  • Build Envoy with make update-base. Again, this is not a quick process. The build happens in a Docker container; you can set DOCKER_HOST to point to a powerful machine if you like.

  • Test Envoy and run with Envoy's test suite (which we don't run during normal Ambassador development) by running make check-envoy. Be warned that Envoy's full test suite requires several hundred gigabytes of disk space to run.

    Inner dev-loop steps:

    • To run just specific tests, instead of the whole test suite, set the ENVOY_TEST_LABEL enviornment variable. For example, to run just the unit tests in test/common/network/listener_impl_test.cc, you should run

      ENVOY_TEST_LABEL='//test/common/network:listener_impl_test' make check-envoy

    • You can run make envoy-shell to get a Bash shell in the Docker container that does the Envoy builds.

    Interpreting the test results:

    • If you see the following message, don't worry, it's harmless; the tests still ran:

      There were tests whose specified size is too big. Use the --test_verbose_timeout_warnings command line option to see which ones these are.

      The message means that the test passed, but it passed too quickly, and Bazel is suggesting that you declare it as smaller. Something along the lines of "This test only took 2s, but you declared it as being in the 60s-300s ('moderate') bucket, consider declaring it as being in the 0s-60s ('short') bucket".

      Don't be confused (as I was) in to thinking that it was saying that the test was too big and was skipped and that you need to throw more hardware at it.

  • Build or test Ambassador with the usual make commands, with the exception that you MUST run make update-base first whenever Envoy needs to be recompiled; it won't happen automatically. So make test to build-and-test Ambassador would become make update-base && make test, and make images to just build Ambassador would become make update-base && make images. By default (to keep the tests fast), the tests avoid running much traffic through Envoy, and instead just check that the Envoy configuration that Ambassador generates hasn't changed since the previous version (since we generally trust that Enovy works, and doesn't change as aoften). Since you are changing Envoy, you'll need to run the tests with KAT_RUN_MODE=envoy set in the environment in order to actually test against Envoy.

5. Finalizing your changes

Once you're happy with your changes to Envoy:

  1. Ensure they're committed to _cxx/envoy/ and push/PR them in to https://github.com/datawire/envoy branch rebase/master.

    If you're outside of Datawire, you'll need to a. Create a fork of https://github.com/datawire/envoy on the GitHub web interface b. Add it as a remote to your ./_cxx/envoy/: git remote add my-fork git@github.com:YOUR_USERNAME/envoy.git c. Push the branch to that fork: git push my-fork YOUR_BRANCHNAME

  2. Update ENVOY_COMMIT in _cxx/envoy.mk

  3. Unset ENVOY_COMMIT=- and run a final make update-base to push a cached build:

    export YES_I_AM_OK_WITH_COMPILING_ENVOY=true
export YES_I_AM_UPDATING_THE_BASE_IMAGES=true
unset ENVOY_COMMIT
make update-base

    The image will be pushed to $ENVOY_DOCKER_REPO, by default ENVOY_DOCKER_REPO=docker.io/datawire/ambassador-base; if you're outside of Datawire, you can skip this step if you don't want to share your Envoy binary anywhere. If you don't skip this step, you'll need to export ENVOY_DOCKER_REPO=${your-envoy-docker-registry} to tell it to push somewhere other than Datawire's registry.

    If you're at Datawire, you'll then want to make sure that the image is also pushed to the backup container registries:

    TAG=GET_THIS_FROM_THE_make_update-base_OUTPUT

source_registry=docker.io/datawire
docker pull "$source_registry/ambassador-base:$TAG"
for target_registry in quay.io/datawire gcr.io/datawire; do
  docker tag "$source_registry/ambassador-base:$TAG" "$target_registry/ambassador-base:$TAG"
  docker push "$target_registry/ambassador-base:$TAG"
done

    If you're outside of Datawire, you can skip this step if you don't want to share your Envoy binary anywhere. If you don't skip this step, you'll need to export ENVOY_DOCKER_REPO=${your-envoy-docker-registry} to tell it to push somewhere other than Datawire's registry.

  4. Push/PR the envoy.mk ENVOY_COMMIT change to https://github.com/datawire/ambassador (or https://github.com/datawire/apro if you're inside Datawire).

6. Checklist for landing the changes

I'd put this in in the pull request template, but so few PRs change Envoy...

  • The image has been pushed to...
    • docker.io/datawire/ambassador-base
    • quay.io/datawire/ambassador-base
    • gcr.io/datawire/ambassador-base
  • The envoy.git commit has been tagged as datawire-$(git describe --tags --match='v*') (the --match is to prevent datawire-* tags from stacking on eachother).
  • It's been tested with...
    • make check-envoy
    • make pytest KAT_RUN_MODE=envoy for OSS
    • make pytest KAT_RUN_MODE=envoy for AES

How do I test Ambassador when using a private Docker repository?

If you are pushing your development images to a private Docker repo, then

export DEV_USE_IMAGEPULLSECRET=true
export DOCKER_BUILD_USERNAME=...
export DOCKER_BUILD_PASSWORD=...

and the test machinery should create an imagePullSecret from those Docker credentials such that it can pull the images.

How do I change the loglevel at runtime?

$ curl localhost:8877/ambassador/v0/diag/?loglevel=debug

Note: This affects diagd and Envoy, but NOT the AES amb-sidecar. See the AES DEVELOPING.md for how to do that.

Developing Ambassador (Datawire-only advice)

At the moment, these techniques will only work internally to Datawire. Mostly this is because they require credentials to access internal resources at the moment, though in several cases we're working to fix that.

How do I test my documentation work?

This will currently only work within Datawire.

After you've made some documentation changes, run

bash ambassador/scripts/doc-setup

to do all the Javascript work needed to get a local documentation server running. You can point a web browser to http://localhost:8000 to view docs with your changes.

After running ambassador/scripts/doc-setup, if you need to make further changes, run

bash ambassador/scripts/doc-sync

to push your changes to the local webserver. They should appear immediately (you may have to reload the page in your browser).

How do I share a preview of my documentation work with others?

This will currently only work within Datawire.

After running ambassador/scripts/doc-setup, run

bash ambassador/scripts/doc-publish

to push a preview to the getambassador-preview Netlify site. Find the Netlify preview URL in the output and hand it off to others.

How do I update the getambassador-preview site with my documentation for others to use?

This will currently only work within Datawire.

After running ambassador/scripts/doc-setup, run

bash ambassador/scripts/doc-publish --prod

to update the live getambassador-preview Netlify site.

How do I build ambassador on Windows using WSL?

As the ambassador build sequence requires docker communication via a UNIX socket, using WSL 1 is not possible. Not even with a DOCKER_HOST environment variable set. As a result, you have to use WSL 2, including using the WSL 2 version of docker-for-windows.

Additionally, if your hostname contains an upper-case character, the build script will break. This is based on the NAME environment variable, which should contain your hostname. You can solve this issue by doing export NAME=my-lowercase-host-name. If you do this after you've already run make images once, you will manually have to clean up the docker images that have been created using your upper-case host name.