DEVELOPMENT.md

Quick Developer Guide

If you are reading this, it means you are about to work on the codebase.

Table of Contents

• Getting started
  • Installing dependencies
  • Development flow

Getting started

Installing dependencies

To start, you'll need to run a few commands to make sure you have the correct development environment tools installed:

• make install_deps_<os> where <os> can be linux or macos. This will install the proto compiler under /usr/local/bin/protoc.
• make install_lint. This will install golangci-lint at the version used during Drand's development.
• make build_proto. This will compile the project's proto files.

Finally, if you ran all the above commands and git status does not report any changes to the repository, then you are ready to start.

Development flow

After editing all files required by your change:

• Run all tests using make test. This will run both unit and integration tests.
• Check your code coverage using make coverage.
• Check that all code still compiles using make build_all.
• Test operations still work using the test/local.sh script. You can terminate it using the CTRL+C/SIGINT and will clean all spawned processes.

You can also run regression testing, see the section below.

Testing with Docker Compose

To test changes using Docker Compose, navigate to Docker Readme and follow the steps described there.

Testing with in-memory storage as database backend

Drand supports running with an in-memory storage provider for storing beacons.

To check your code against it, run make test-unit-memdb.

You can also run the make demo-memdb command to launch the scripted demo using in-memory storage as a backend.

Testing with PostgreSQL as database backend

Drand supports PostgreSQL as a database backend for storing beacons.

To check your code against it, run make test-unit-postgres.

You can also run the make demo-postgres command to launch the scripted demo using PostgreSQL as a backend.

If you want to run an isolated version of Postgres, you can use the test/docker-compose.yaml file from the root of this repository to do so.

To start the database, use:

cd test/
docker-compose up -d

To stop the database, use:

docker-compose down

If you wish to remove the database volume too, use this command instead to stop:

docker-compose down --volumes --remove-orphans

Regression testing

To make sure new changes can integrate without issues with the existing deployments, you can run regression testing.

To do so, run the following commands:

git checkout master
go build -o drand-existing
git checkout <your-branch>
go build -o drand-candidate
go run ./demo/regression -release ./drand-existing -candidate ./drand-candidate

If you want to test your code against the PostgreSQL backend, replace the go run command above with:

go run ./demo/regression -db=postgres -release ./drand-existing -candidate ./drand-candidate