Developers

This guide provides a quick start for developers wishing to contribute to ClusterLink.

Setting up a development environment

Here are the key steps for setting up your developer environment, making a change and testing it:

1. Install required tools (you can either do this manually or use the project’s devcontainer specification)
   • Go version 1.20 or higher.
   • Git command line.
   • We recommend using a local development environment such as kind/kubectl for local development and integration testing.
   • Additional development packages, such as goimports and golangci-lint. See the full list in post-create.sh.
2. Clone our repository with git clone git@github.com:clusterlink-net/clusterlink.git.
3. Run make test-prereqs and install any missing required development tools.
4. Run make build to ensure the code builds as expected. This will pull in all needed dependencies.

Making code changes

• If you are planning on contributing back to the project, please carefully read the contribution guide.
• We follow GitHub’s Standard Fork & Pull Request Workflow

All contributed code should pass precommit checks such as linting and tests. These are run automatically as part of the CI process on every pull request. You may wish to run these locally, before initiating a PR:

$ make precommit
$ make unit-tests tests-e2e-k8s
$ go test ./...

Output of the end-to-end tests is saved to /tmp/clusterlink-k8s-tests. In case of failures, you can also (re-)run individual tests by name:

$ go test -v ./tests/e2e/k8s -testify.m TestConnectivity

Tests in CICD

All pull requests undergo automated testing before being merged. This includes, for example, linting, end-to-end tests and DCO validation. Logs in CICD default to info level, and can be increased to debug by setting environment variable DEBUG=1. You can also enable debug logging from the UI when re-running a CICD job, by selecting “enable debug logging”.

Release Management

ClusterLink releases, including container images and binaries, are built based on version tags in github. Applying a tag that’s prefixed by -v will automatically trigger a new release through the github release action.

Please kindly mark all PR’s to aid in auto-generation of changelog from commits, by labeling pull requests with one or more of the following labels:

• ignore-for-release: PR should not be included in the changelog report. This label should not be used together with any other label in this list.
• documentation: PR is a documentation update.
• bugfix: PR is fixing a bug in existing code.
• enhancement: PR provides new or extended functionality.
• breaking-change: PR introduces a breaking change in user facing aspects (e.g., API or CLI). This label may be used in addition to other labels (e.g., bugfix or enhancement).