[ANN] New development environment for ovirt-engine

[Alon Bar-Lev]

Hello,

As promised, I updated the wiki pages of engine developer environment to refer to this[1] single new page, I hope in time we can merge all non-trivial contributions into the README.developer.

Feel free to contribute/fix as you experience issues.

Regards,
Alon Bar-Lev.

[1] http://www.ovirt.org/OVirt_Engine_Development_Environment

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Alon Bar-Lev" <alonbl at redhat.com>
> To: "engine-devel" <engine-devel at ovirt.org>
> Cc: "Yaniv Bronheim" <ybronhei at redhat.com>, "Moti Asayag" <masayag at redhat.com>, "Limor Gavish" <lgavish at gmail.com>,
> "Sharad Mishra" <snmishra at us.ibm.com>, "Alex Lourie" <alourie at redhat.com>, "Sandro Bonazzola" <sbonazzo at redhat.com>,
> "arch" <arch at ovirt.org>, "Ofer Schreiber" <oschreib at redhat.com>
> Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 2:52:51 PM
> Subject: [ANN] New development environment for ovirt-engine
> 
> Hello all ovirt-engine developers,
> 
> When I first joined the ovirt project, it took me about two weeks to setup a
> development environment, I needed to work on a bug related to host-deploy so
> I needed an environment that could use the ssh, PKI, vdsm-bootstrap and
> communicate with vdsm using SSL, this was virtually impossible to do so
> without tweaking the product in a way that it is so different from
> production use, that I cannot guarantee that whatever tested in development
> will actually work in production.
> 
> I peeked at the installation script in a hope that I can create partial
> environment similar to production, but I found that the packaging
> implementation makes to much assumption and is very difficult to adopt. The
> fact that I do not use fedora/rhel for my development made it even worse.
> 
> I had no other option than to create rpms after each of my changes and test
> each in real production like setup.
> 
> It was obvious to me that the manual customization of developers to achieve
> working product will eventually break as product grow and move away from
> being developer friendly to production friendly. For example, product
> defaults cannot be these which serve developers, but these which serve
> production the best, or having a valid PKI setup cannot be optional any more
> as components do need to use it. Same for location of files and
> configuration, for example, if we write a pluggable infrastructure for
> branding, we cannot damage the interface just because developers runs the
> product in their own manual customization.
> 
> I took the opportunity handed to me to port the ovirt-engine to other
> distributions in order to provide a development environment that is similar
> to production setup. Together with Sandro Bonazzola and Alex Lourie we
> re-wrote the whole installation of the product which can also be used to
> setup the desired development environment.
> 
> Within this environment the product is set up using the same tools and
> configuration as in production, while the process does not require special
> privileges nor changes the state of the developer machine.
> 
> A complete documentation is available[1], I preferred to use README within
> the source tree as wiki tend to quickly become obsolete, while documentation
> within source tree can be modified by the commit that introduces a change. I
> will redirect to this file from the current wiki once the site will be up.
> 
> In a nut shell, after installing prerequisites, build and install the product
> using:
> 
> $ make clean install-dev PREFIX=$HOME/ovirt-engine
> 
> This will run maven and create product installation at $HOME/ovirt-engine
> Next, a setup phase is required just like in production, to initialize
> configuration and database:
> 
> $ $HOME/ovirt-engine/bin/engine-setup-2
> 
> You have now fully functional product, including PKI, SSL, host-deploy,
> tools.
> No manual database updates are required, no lose of functionality.
> 
> All that is left is to start the engine service:
> 
> $ $HOME/ovirt-engine/share/ovirt-engine/services/ovirt-engine.py start
> 
> Access to application:
>    http://localhost:8080
>    https://localhost:8443
> Debugging port is opened at port 8787.
> 
> Farther information exists in the documentation[1].
> 
> There are several inherit benefits of the new environment, the major one is
> the ability to manage several environments in parallel on the same host. For
> example, if we develop two separate features on two branches we can install
> the product into $HOME/ovirt-engine-feature1 and
> $HOME/ovirt-engine-feature-2 and have a separate database for each, if we
> modify the ports jboss is listening to we can run two instances of engine at
> the same time!
> 
> We will be happy to work with all developers to assist in porting into the
> new development environment, the simplest is to create a new database for
> this effort. Moti has a sequence of converting the existing database owned
> by postgres to be owned by the engine, Moti, can you please share that?
> 
> We are sure there are missing bits, we will be happy to know these so we can
> improve.
> 
> I am aware that developers (especially java) are conservative, but I ask you
> to give us a chance, so that we make it easy for developers to join the
> project, and to allow us to drop the parallel effort of packaging to
> production and fixing the broken development environment.
> 
> A special thanks to developers who took the time to test and provide feedback
> before the merged:
> - Yaniv Bronheim
> - Moti Asayag
> - Limor Gavish
> - Sharad Mishra
> - Ofer Schreiber
> 
> We are hoping that after migration you will be find this environment useful
> and friendly,
> 
> Sandro Bonazzola,
> Alex Lourie,
> Alon Bar-Lev.
> 
> [1]
> http://gerrit.ovirt.org/gitweb?p=ovirt-engine.git;a=blob;f=README.developer;hb=HEAD