Debug Kubernetes Operator-sdk locally using Vscode

I recently got started with Kubernetes Operators on Openshift 4.1 . A lot of lessons learned but have more to learn.

What are Operators

Kubernetes Operator are a way of leveraging the Kubernetties API to create your own Kubernetes custom resources.

The project I am working on Integreatly is using the Operator-sdk framework to build operators, this takes some of the complexity out of building a Kubernetes Operators.

I won’t go into the basic of installing a operator that’s documented in the Operator-sdk docs.

Running Locally

You can run the Operator-sdk locally, and point it at the namespace for your operator

operator-sdk up local --namespace=integreatly-operator
# command changed as off v0.15.0
operator-sdk run --local --namespace=integreatly-operator

What this means that instead of having to build a container image and push it to a app registry like quay.io or dockerhub.com, you can just use your local code base as the source instead of a container image and use it to deploy your operator to your Openshift 4 cluster.

Setup Vscode to debug

I use Vscode so how do I debug using operator-sdk up local?

Delve is a debug tool for Golang, it can be downloaded here https://github.com/go-delve/delve/tree/master/Documentation/installation or by just using go

go get -u github.com/go-delve/delve/cmd/dlv

Delve is used by this Vscode Go plugin https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode.Go

You need to run delve with the command line switch — enable-delve on the up local command

e.g. The operator I am working on is called integreatly-opeartor so the commands to run it are as follows

NOTE: `WATCH_NAMESPACE` should always point to the namespace for your operator

You will need a launch json for Vscode to interact with this headless mode of delve

{
  “version”: “0.2.0”,
  “configurations”: [
    { 
      “name”: “Integreatly Operator”,
      “type”: “go”,
      “request”: “launch”,
      “mode”: “auto”, 
      “program”: “${workspaceFolder}/cmd/manager/main.go”,
      “env”: { 
        “WATCH_NAMESPACE”: “integreatly-operator”
      },
      “args”: []
    }
  ] 
}

Start the Vscode debugger. Open the Debug console and you will see the standard output from the operator-sdk up local command, Your debugger will stop on the set breakpoints.

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