Getting Set Up for Spinnaker Development

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:

1. Select New > Project from Existing Sources
2. 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:

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