dex/Documentation/dev-guide.md

Dev Guide

No DB mode

When you are working on dex it's convenient to use the "--no-db" flag, which starts up Dex in a mode which uses an in-memory datastore for persistence. It also does not rotate keys, so no overlord is required.

In this mode you provide the binary with paths to files to connectors and users - there are example files you can use inside of static/fixtures, named "connectors.json.sample" and "users.json.sample" respectively. If you rename these to the equivalent without the ".sample", the defaults point to this location, making starting dex as simple as:

./bin/dex-worker --no-db

Do not use this flag in production - it's not thread safe and data is destroyed when the process dies. In addition, there is no key rotation.

Note: If you want to test out the registration flow, you need to enable that feature by passing --enable-registration=true as well.

Building

To build using the go binary on your host, use the ./build script.

You can also use a copy of go hosted inside a Docker container if you prefix your command with go-docker, as in: ./go-docker ./build

Docker Build and Push

Once binaries are compiled you can build and push a dex image to quay.io. Before doing this step binaries must be built above using one of the build tools.

export DOCKER_USER=<<your user>>
export DOCKER_PASSWORD=<<your password>>
./build-docker-push

By default the script pushes to quay.io/coreos/dex; if you want to push to a different repository, override the DOCKER_REGISTRY and DOCKER_REPO environment variables.

Rebuild API from JSON schema

Go API bindings are generated from a JSON Discovery file. To regenerate run:

./schema/generator

For updating generator dependencies see docs in: schema/generator_import.go.

Running Tests

To run all tests (except functional) use the ./test script;

If you want to test a single package only, use PKG=<pkgname> ./test

The functional tests require a database; create a database (eg. createdb dex_func_test) and then pass it as an environment variable to the functional test script, eg. DEX_TEST_DSN=postgres://localhost/dex_func_test?sslmode=disable ./test-functional

To run these tests with Docker is a little trickier; you need to have a container running Postgres, and then you need to link that container to the container running your tests:

# Run the Postgres docker container, which creates a db called "postgres"
docker run --name dex_postgres -d postgres

# The host name in the DSN is "postgres"; that works because that is what we
# will alias the link as, which causes Docker to modify /etc/hosts with a "postgres"
# entry.
export DEX_TEST_DSN=postgres://postgres@postgres/postgres?sslmode=disable

# Run the test container, linking it to the Postgres container.
DOCKER_LINKS=dex_postgres:postgres DOCKER_ENV=DEX_TEST_DSN ./go-docker ./test-functional docker

# Remove the container after the tests are run.
rm -f dex_postgres