Contributing to Tink

Tink is the collective term for the codebase that lives in the tinkerbell/tink repository, which is a monorepo for the tink-cli, tink-server, and tink-worker.

These 3 sub-projects share the same repo because they have a lot of code in common, mainly coming from the gRPC client and server. This repository contains the generated gRPC client for Golang as well.

Below we have documented some specific techniques used to develop the components of the Tink repository.

Running the gRPC API and CLI Locally

You can just spin up just the tink-cli and the tink-server with their dependencies, and nothing more, directly on a host. This makes it easier to run debuggers, and minimizes extra layers that are more complicated or a waste of time.

The only external dependency that is needed when working on the tink-cli or tink-server is PostgreSQL. It is the database used by tink-server to store resources like Workflows, Hardware Data, and Templates. You can use Docker to manage it for you.

docker run -d -e POSTGRES_USER=tinkerbell -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=tinkerbell -p 5432:5432 postgres:10-alpine

In order to apply the database configuration for Tink to the PostgreSQL database, run tink-server with the ONLY_MIGRATION environment variable set to true.

export PGPASSWORD=tinkerbell
export FACILITY=onprem
export PGDATABASE=tinkerbell
export PGHOST=127.0.0.1
export PGSSLMODE=disable
export PGUSER=tinkerbell
export TINKERBELL_GRPC_AUTHORITY=:42113
export TINKERBELL_HTTP_AUTHORITY=:42114
export ONLY_MIGRATION=true

go run cmd/tink-server/main.go

This will run tink-server in migration mode. If you unset ONLY_MIGRATION and you run the go run command again it will start the actual gRPC and HTTP server.

At this point, you can develop on the tink-cli and run it with go run.

go run cmd/tink-cli/main.go help