Intro

See minikube installation guide

Make sure you use the latest version of Minikube.

After the installation, issue

    $ minikube start

Note: if you are running on a Mac, you may also use Docker for Mac Kubernetes instead of a docker-machine.

Once you have it started successfully, use the quickstart guide in order to test your that your setup is working.

Note: if you use multiple Kubernetes clusters, you can switch to Minikube with kubectl config use-context minikube

Create ConfigMap

ConfigMap is used to store the configuration of the operator

    $ kubectl --context minikube  create -f manifests/configmap.yaml

Deploying the operator

First you need to install the service account definition in your Minikube cluster.

    $ kubectl --context minikube create -f manifests/operator-service-account-rbac.yaml

Next deploy the postgres-operator from the docker image Zalando is using:

    $ kubectl --context minikube create -f manifests/postgres-operator.yaml

If you prefer to build the image yourself follow up down below.

Check if CustomResourceDefinition has been registered

    $ kubectl --context minikube   get crd

    NAME                          KIND
    postgresqls.acid.zalan.do     CustomResourceDefinition.v1beta1.apiextensions.k8s.io

Create a new Spilo cluster

    $ kubectl --context minikube  create -f manifests/minimal-postgres-manifest.yaml

Watch pods being created

    $ kubectl --context minikube  get pods -w --show-labels

Connect to PostgreSQL

We can use the generated secret of the postgres robot user to connect to our acid-minimal-cluster master running in Minikube:

    $ export HOST_PORT=$(minikube service acid-minimal-cluster --url | sed 's,.*/,,')
    $ export PGHOST=$(echo $HOST_PORT | cut -d: -f 1)
    $ export PGPORT=$(echo $HOST_PORT | cut -d: -f 2)
    $ export PGPASSWORD=$(kubectl --context minikube get secret postgres.acid-minimal-cluster.credentials -o 'jsonpath={.data.password}' | base64 -d)
    $ psql -U postgres

Setup development environment

The following steps guide you through the setup to work on the operator itself.

Setting up Go

Postgres operator is written in Go. Use the installation instructions if you don't have Go on your system. You won't be able to compile the operator with Go older than 1.7. We recommend installing the latest one.

Go projects expect their source code and all the dependencies to be located under the GOPATH. Normally, one would create a directory for the GOPATH (i.e. ~/go) and place the source code under the ~/go/src subdirectories.

Given the schema above, the postgres operator source code located at github.com/zalando-incubator/postgres-operator should be put at -~/go/src/github.com/zalando-incubator/postgres-operator.

    $ export GOPATH=~/go
    $ mkdir -p ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/zalando-incubator/
    $ cd ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/zalando-incubator/
    $ git clone https://github.com/zalando-incubator/postgres-operator.git

Building the operator

You need Glide to fetch all dependencies. Install it with:

    $ make tools

Next, install dependencies with glide by issuing:

    $ make deps

This would take a while to complete. You have to redo make deps every time you dependencies list changes, i.e. after adding a new library dependency.

Build the operator docker image and pushing it to Pier One:

    $ make docker push

You may define the TAG variable to assign an explicit tag to your docker image and the IMAGE to set the image name. By default, the tag is computed with git describe --tags --always --dirty and the image is pierone.stups.zalan.do/acid/postgres-operator

Building the operator binary (for testing the out-of-cluster option):

    $ make

The binary will be placed into the build directory.

Deploying self build image

The fastest way to run your docker image locally is to reuse the docker from minikube. The following steps will get you the docker image built and deployed.

    $ eval $(minikube docker-env)
    $ export TAG=$(git describe --tags --always --dirty)
    $ make docker
    $ sed -e "s/\(image\:.*\:\).*$/\1$TAG/" manifests/postgres-operator.yaml|kubectl --context minikube create  -f -

Debugging the operator

There is a web interface in the operator to observe its internal state. The operator listens on port 8080. It is possible to expose it to the localhost:8080 by doing:

$ kubectl --context minikube port-forward $(kubectl --context minikube get pod -l name=postgres-operator -o jsonpath={.items..metadata.name}) 8080:8080

The inner 'query' gets the name of the postgres operator pod, and the outer enables port forwarding. Afterwards, you can access the operator API with:

$ curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/$endpoint| jq .

The available endpoints are listed below. Note that the worker ID is an integer from 0 up to 'workers' - 1 (value configured in the operator configuration and defaults to 4)

  • /databases - all databases per cluster
  • /workers/all/queue - state of the workers queue (cluster events to process)
  • /workers/$id/queue - state of the queue for the worker $id
  • /workers/$id/logs - log of the operations performed by a given worker
  • /clusters/ - list of teams and clusters known to the operator
  • /clusters/$team - list of clusters for the given team
  • /cluster/$team/$clustername - detailed status of the cluster, including the specifications for CRD, master and replica services, endpoints and statefulsets, as well as any errors and the worker that cluster is assigned to.
  • /cluster/$team/$clustername/logs/ - logs of all operations performed to the cluster so far.
  • /cluster/$team/$clustername/history/ - history of cluster changes triggered by the changes of the manifest (shows the somewhat obscure diff and what exactly has triggered the change)

The operator also supports pprof endpoints listed at the pprof package, such as:

  • /debug/pprof/
  • /debug/pprof/cmdline
  • /debug/pprof/profile
  • /debug/pprof/symbol
  • /debug/pprof/trace

It's possible to attach a debugger to troubleshoot postgres-operator inside a docker container. It's possible with gdb and delve. Since the latter one is a specialized debugger for golang, we will use it as an example. To use it you need:

  • Install delve locally
go get -u github.com/derekparker/delve/cmd/dlv
  • Add following dependencies to the Dockerfile
RUN apk --no-cache add go git musl-dev
RUN go get github.com/derekparker/delve/cmd/dlv
  • Update the Makefile to build the project with debugging symbols. For that you need to add gcflags to a build target for corresponding OS (e.g. linux)
-gcflags "-N -l"
  • Run postgres-operator under the delve. For that you need to replace ENTRYPOINT with the following CMD:
CMD ["/root/go/bin/dlv", "--listen=:DLV_PORT", "--headless=true", "--api-version=2", "exec", "/postgres-operator"]
  • Forward the listening port
kubectl port-forward POD_NAME DLV_PORT:DLV_PORT
  • Attach to it
$ dlv connect 127.0.0.1:DLV_PORT

Unit tests

To run all unit tests, you can simply do:

$ go test ./...

For go 1.9 vendor directory would be excluded automatically. For previous versions you can exclude it manually:

$ go test $(glide novendor)

In case if you need to debug your unit test, it's possible to use delve:

$ dlv test ./pkg/util/retryutil/
Type 'help' for list of commands.
(dlv) c
PASS