Developing for NGINX Ingress Controller

This document explains how to get started with developing for NGINX Ingress controller.

Prerequisites

Install Go 1.14 or later.

!!! note The project uses Go Modules

Install Docker (v19.03.0 or later with experimental feature on)

!!! important The majority of make tasks run as docker containers

Start a local Kubernetes cluster using kind, build and deploy the ingress controller

make dev-env

If you are working on the v1.x.x version of this controller, and you want to create a cluster with kubernetes version 1.22, then please visit the documentation for kind, and look for how to set a custom image for the kind node (image: kindest/node...), in the kind config file.

Run go unit tests

make test

Run unit-tests for lua code

make lua-test

Lua tests are located in the directory rootfs/etc/nginx/lua/test

!!! important Test files must follow the naming convention <mytest>_test.lua or it will be ignored

Run e2e test suite

make kind-e2e-test

To limit the scope of the tests to execute, we can use the environment variable FOCUS

FOCUS="no-auth-locations" make kind-e2e-test

!!! note The variable FOCUS defines Ginkgo Focused Specs

Valid values are defined in the describe definition of the e2e tests like Default Backend

The complete list of tests can be found here

In some cases, it can be useful to build a docker image and publish such an image to a private or custom registry location.

This can be done setting two environment variables, REGISTRY and TAG

export TAG="dev"
export REGISTRY="$USER"

make build image

and then publish such version with

docker push $REGISTRY/controller:$TAG