Setting up a local development environment

This page documents the high level steps and a few gotchas / config steps out of the default that will get you up and running developing features. It will detail the basic setup, including what the toolchain looks like and has looked like through the project history.

Software

In order to minimise the number of separate downloads and setup required to get kubernetes and the rest of the stack running locally, I opted to use rancher desktop as my container runtime and kubernetes solution for local development.
It has packages for all common operating systems and is easy to configure for what we need it for. Most of the other software is optional and only needs to be downloaded if you want/need to use it.

This list assumes you already have basic tools like git etc. installed!

Name / Link	Notes
Python 3	Currently project uses `3.11`, ensure pip is installed too!
Rancher Desktop	The main development / local run platform (k3s)
Helm	For deploying things to k8s directly from your machine.
Terrform	For building / bootstrapping resources (k8s cluster) in aws
Sqlite3	For looking in the local database file after tests etc.

Cloning the repo

If not already done, clone the repo now. The documentation will give paths and commands relative to the root of the repository. So clone and cd into it.

git clone https://github.com/w3s7y/fluffy-octo-telegram.git
cd fluffy-octo-telegram

Setting up python

pip3 install poetry
poetry install

Setting up rancher

After installing rancher you will want to open the Preferences and set the following: * navigate to the Container Engine section and select dockerd (moby). * navigate to the Kubernetes section and ensure k8s is enabled.

You can then test if kubernetes and the rest of rancher at large is functioning by running:

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces

If you get a small table with a number of rows returned you are good to move on.

Host aliases

To use the Ingress rules we create, create some local hostfile entries.

# Host entries for fluffy-octo-telegram testing
127.0.0.1   dev.vets.internal production.vets.internal
# ci/cd entries
127.0.0.1   argocd.vets.internal workflows.vets.internal 
# Monitoring
127.0.0.1   loki.vets.internal grafana.vets.internal alertmanager.vets.internal prometheus.vets.internal 
# user admin / secrets
127.0.0.1   reset.vets.internal admin.vets.internal vault.vets.internal
# pgadmin
127.0.0.1   pgadmin.dev.vets.internal pgadmin.production.vets.internal

Deploy argocd

# Create a namespace in k8s for argo
kubectl create ns argocd
# Install argocd 
kubectl apply -n argocd -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/stable/manifests/install.yaml

This will probably take a few minutes to pull the images down and do the init routines. Check for when the server is running: kubectl get pods -n argocd.

Deploy remaining cluster services

helm install cluster-services deploy-descriptors/cluster/chart --namespace argocd

Creation of app secrets

Manually for now

kubectl create ns dev-vets
kubectl create secret generic vets-app -n dev-vets \
  --from-literal=DJANGO_SECRET_KEY='<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< A VERY LONG RANDOM STRING >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>' \
  --from-literal=POSTGRES_PASSWORD='<<<<< A COMPLEX PASSWORD >>>>>'

Repeat for namespace production-vets as well.

This will be moved to a vault implementation of secrets soon.

Deploy vets

kubectl apply -n argocd -f deploy-descriptors/vets/argocd.yaml

Validating everything is working

Testing local python running

poetry run vets-app-manage migrate
poetry run vets-app-manage test --keepdb
poetry run vets-app-manage runserver

Testing on k8s

kubectl get pods -n dev-vets