Local mode

This document assumes that you have your local environment set up to run Commodore as commodore. See Running Commodore for a guide to get your local environment set up.

Commodore provides a local mode for the catalog compile command. Local mode can be enabled with the --local flag.

Local mode is intended for local development, and won’t fetch information from the SYNventory API or clone Git repositories for the inventory and components. However, by default Commodore will fetch Jsonnet dependencies in local mode (using jsonnet-bundler) and will configure Kapitan to fetch dependencies. This dependency fetching can be disabled with the --no-fetch-dependencies command line flag.

commodore catalog compile <cluster-id> --local [--no-fetch-dependencies]

In local mode, the existing directory structure in the working directory is used. This allows local development on components and also allows testing local modifications to the inventory.

The user is responsible for preparing the working directory to hold a directory structure which Commodore understands. We recommend running Commodore in regular mode once to fetch all the inputs which are required to compile the catalog for the selected cluster.

commodore catalog compile <cluster-id>

Local mode will perform component discovery and will create Kapitan targets for discovered components. However, Commodore will only create targets for components which are present in dependencies/. See the next section for a set of steps to add existing components to a cluster in local mode.

Add existing component to a cluster in local mode

To add an existing component to a cluster in local mode for testing purposes, the following steps can be used. This example uses the nfs-subdir-external-provisioner component.

Clone the component, if it’s not present in dependencies/

COMPONENT_NAME=nfs-subdir-external-provisioner
test -d dependencies/${COMPONENT_NAME} || \
git clone https://github.com/projectsyn/component-${COMPONENT_NAME}.git \
    dependencies/${COMPONENT_NAME}

Add the component to the cluster, by adding it in the applications array in the cluster config:
```
applications:
  - nfs-subdir-external-provisioner
```
Run Commodore in local mode with dependency fetching enabled
```
commodore catalog compile <cluster-id> --local
```
Now you can configure the component and test changes with dependency fetching disabled
```
commodore catalog compile <cluster-id> --local --no-fetch-dependencies
```

Testing a new component in local mode

Commodore’s component new command won’t insert the component into the current cluster configuration. In order to test a new component in local mode, you need to explicitly add the component to the cluster by following the steps in the previous section. Note that you can omit step 1 of the previous section, as component new will ensure that the component repo is initialized in dependencies/.