Develop Using Tilt¶

A pre-requisite for developing with Tilt in Kubernetes is to check out and follow the steps outlined in the Verathread Developer Toolkit documentation, you can find the repository here.

Once you have completed those steps then you can proceed with the below steps.

You can clone the toolkit using this command:

git clone git@github.com:azarc-io/verathread-dev-toolkit.git

Tilt¶

Tilt is a tool that makes it easy to develop on a kubernetes environment with the following benefits:

Iterate on charts with hot reloading
Backend and Frontend live reloading
Debug code from your ide
Work in an environment that simulates where your software will be running in production
Easily monitor all your logs and perform custom actions from a ui such as resetting your database

You can read the Tilt documentation here

Warning

Before proceeding please make sure you have completed the pre-requisite step as outlined at the top of this document.

Setting which kubernetes context to use¶

By default, the context is set to k3d-dev-1 in the tilt_config.json file, this is the correct value when using the Verathread Developer Toolkit however it can be changed if you are running your own kubernetes cluster.

Switching between HMR and Production mode for Frontend¶

By default, HMR is enabled when you run tilt up if you would like to get a better feel for your bundle sizes you can edit the tilt_config.json file in the root of the project and set hmr to false. This will require you to click on the little refresh icon in the tilt dashboard to do a full reload, now when you edit your front end you will have to manually refresh your page but your bundles will be smaller.

Tip

If switching does not work after updating the tilt_config.json file while tilt is running you can click on the reload icon in the tilt dashboard to re-deploy the chart and it should then work. This might take a minuite or two to complete due to the lager initial docker image push required.

Running in HMR more produces a larger docker image, but once it's pushed updates happen quickly.

Setting the correct `GOARCH` for your system¶

By default, Tilt is building for arm64 however you can easily change this by editing the tilt_config.json in the root of the project.

If you are running an Arm cpu
```
{
  "arch": "arm64"
}
```
If you are running an X86 cpu
```
{
  "arch": "amd64"
}
```

Debugging the Backend¶

Delve is the debugger that is used when you debug in your ide, we use the same delve binary within the docker images during development and expose a debug port that you can connect to from your IDE in order to debug your code while it runs inside Kubernetes.

This consumes extra memory and cpu and is turned off by default, in order to enable debugging you can edit the tilt_config.json file in the root of the project and add the name of the service to the debug list.

{
  "to-debug": [
    "gateway"
  ]
}

Tip

If debugging does not work after updating this file while tilt is running you can click on the reload icon in the tilt dashboard to re-deploy the chart and it should then work.

All services expose their debug port on 40000 but are mapped to different local ports. The gateway is mapped to port 40000 locally.

Info

You can change the debug port if it clashes with another project by chaging the relevant port value in the tilt_config.json

    {
        "gateway-debug-port": "40000",
    }

Bring up the stack¶

Tip

If tilt up returns an error that the port is in use then use --port <Number> to set a different port, this can happen if you are running multiple tilt projects at the same time.

While still in the root of the project run tilt up an url will be presented on the command line, click on it to open the Tilt dashboard, here you can view the status of builds and chart deployments. You can click on any of these to view logs, and you can click on the little restart icon to forcefully refresh each one.

Once everything is running you can start coding, when you make changes to the backend or front end code your changes will be hot reloaded and synced to kubernetes, the process is quite quick when running locally.

Tip

You can now access the web interface at http://dev.cluster.local

Tearing down the stack¶

You can run tilt down to destroy everything that was deployed using tilt up, this will not remove anything managed by the Verathread Developer Toolkit.