Hacking on JX

This guide is for developers who want to improve the jenkins-x jx CLI. These instructions will help you set up a development environment for working on the jx source code.

Prerequisites

To compile and test jx binaries you will need:

• git
• Go 1.9 or later, with support for compiling to linux/amd64
• glide

In most cases, install the prerequisite according to its instructions. See the next section for a note about Go cross-compiling support.

Configuring Go

The jx's binary eCLI is built on your machine in your GO Path.

On macOS, Go can be installed with Homebrew:

$ brew install go 

It is also straightforward to build Go from source:

$ sudo su
$ curl -sSL https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.7.5.src.tar.gz | tar -C /usr/local -xz
$ cd /usr/local/go/src
$ # compile Go for the default platform first, then add cross-compile support
$ ./make.bash --no-clean
$ GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 ./make.bash --no-clean

Fork the Repository

Begin at Github by forking jx, then clone your fork locally. Since jx is a Go package, it should be located at $GOPATH/src/github.com/jenkins-x/jx.

$ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/jenkins-x
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/jenkins-x
$ git clone git@github.com:<username>/jx.git
$ cd jx

Add the conventional upstream git remote in order to fetch changes from jx's main master branch and to create pull requests:

$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/jenkins-x/jx.git

Build Your Changes

With the prerequisites installed and your fork of jx cloned, you can make changes to local jx source code.

Run make to build the jx binaries:

$ make build      # runs glide and builds `jx`  inside the build/

Testing

There's a handy script to output nice syntax highlighted output of test results via:

./test.sh

Or you can use make

make test

Debug logging

Lots of the test have debug output to try figure out when things fail. You can enable verbose debug logging for tests via

export JX_TEST_DEBUG=true

Debugging

First you need to install Delve

Then you should be able to run a debug version of a jx command:

dlv --listen=:2345 --headless=true --api-version=2 exec ./build/jx -- some arguments

Then in you IDE you should be able to then set a breakpoint and connect to 2345.

e.g. in IntellJ you create a new Go Remote execution and then hit Debug

Debugging jx with stdin

If you want to debug using jx with stdin to test out terminal interaction, you can start jx as usual from the command line then:

• find the pid of the jx command via something like ps -elaf | grep jx
• start Delve attaching to the pid:

dlv --listen=:2345 --headless=true --api-version=2 attach SomePID

Using a helper script

If you create a bash file called jxDebug as the following (replacing SomePid with the actual pid):

#!/bin/sh
echo "Debugging jx"
dlv --listen=:2345 --headless=true --api-version=2 exec `which jx` -- $*

Then you can change your jx someArgs CLI to jxDebug someArgs then debug it!