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Setting up the Development Environment

Environment Setup

Prerequisites

Developing on Gloo Gateway requires the following to be installed on your system:

To install all the requirements, do the following:

# install build tools
# - macOS
xcode-select --install
# - other operating systems:
# distro meta-packages, like "build-essential", should have what is required

############################################
# install version of go in go.mod
############################################
# - macOS:
brew install go@1.23
# - other operating systems:
# follow directions at https://go.dev/doc/install

# install protoc
make install-protoc

# install go related tools
make install-go-tools

Setting up the Gloo Gateway repositories

Next, we’ll clone the Gloo Gateway and Solo-Kit source code. Solo-Kit is required for code generation in Gloo Gateway.

To clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/solo-io/gloo
# or with SSH
git clone git@github.com:solo-io/gloo.git

To run the main.go files locally in your system make sure to have a Kubernetes Cluster running.

You should now be able to run any main.go file in the Gloo Gateway repository using:

go run <path-to-cmd>/main.go

For example:

# run gloo locally
go run projects/gloo/cmd/main.go
# run discovery locally
go run projects/discovery/cmd/main.go
# run gateway locally
go run projects/gateway/cmd/main.go

Awesome! You’re ready to start developing on Gloo Gateway! Check out the Writing Upstream Plugins Guide to see how to add plugins to gloo.

Developing with a local K8s cluster (kind)

Developers without a K8s cluster are encouraged to use Docker and Kind to build a development and test environment.

Prerequisites: Install the following tools:

Install Gloo Gateway on a Kind cluster so that you can start making changes to the Gloo Gateway code.

# Prepare the kind cluster, build images, and upload them.
make kind-setup

# Install Gloo Gateway
helm upgrade --install -n gloo-system --create-namespace gloo ./_test/gloo-1.0.1-dev.tgz --values ./test/kubernetes/e2e/tests/manifests/common-recommendations.yaml

############################################
# Make changes to the code in the Gloo Gateway repo. 
############################################

# Update the Gloo Gateway installation in your cluster to apply your changes
make -B kind-build-and-load-gloo

Code Generation

Follow these steps to make changes to Gloo Gateway’s Protobuf-based API.

Confirm code generation works with Gloo Gateway:

make -B generated-code
echo $?

The echo output should be 0 if everything worked correctly.