soleprint/rig/README.md

rig

A runnable local model of a large, regulated estate — legacy and new side by side. Its job is onboarding and exploration, not a production replica: most services are deliberately mocked, because what has to be faithful is the topology, not the workloads.

Prerequisite

Docker. Nothing else — no curl, no jq, no python, no apt repositories.

Starting from plain Windows

Everything here is bash and runs inside a Linux shell, so on a Windows machine that means WSL. Nothing in rig installs WSL, and nothing will: wsl --install enables Windows features and requires a reboot, which is not something a script should do to a machine on your behalf — and there is no tested undo for it.

From an elevated PowerShell or Command Prompt, once:

wsl --install

Then reboot and open the Linux shell it installed.

If you cloned this on the Windows side, copy it into WSL before carrying on. WSL can reach the Windows drives at /mnt/c, and working from there mostly functions — slowly — but file watching does not: that filesystem raises no inotify events, so anything watching for edits silently stops seeing them.

cp -r /mnt/c/Users/<you>/rig ~/rig
cd ~/rig

make deps reports it if you are running from /mnt/.... Then carry on below.

If it fails, the usual causes give unhelpful messages:

symptom	cause
"the virtual machine could not be started"	virtualization disabled in BIOS/UEFI
the command is not recognised	Windows build too old — needs 2004 or later
the install starts, then nothing works	a reboot is still pending

Running the scripts from Git Bash, MSYS or Cygwin does not work — those look close enough to a Linux shell to get started and then fail without /proc or a docker socket. ctrl/deps.sh detects that and says so rather than letting you find out the slow way.

Read the docs first

make docs      # serves on localhost, prints the URL

They run before anything is installed, which matters because they are the instructions for everything else. No cluster and no toolchain required.

Why the code is the way it is — the reasoning, measurements and gotchas — lives in docs/notes/, one file per script, so the code keeps short comments.

Then

make check         # is this machine ready? short; `make check all` for every detail
make deps          # install the toolchain (add `core` on a managed machine)
make cluster up    # cluster + registry + the profile's addons

That is the whole setup. make cluster up also starts this environment's local registry and wires it into the node, so an image built locally is pullable by the cluster without going near docker.io. make check shows its port, among everything else:

make check                  # ... registry    localhost:<port>  (running)
docker build -t localhost:<port>/app:1 .
docker push localhost:<port>/app:1
kubectl --context kind-$(basename $PWD) run app --image=localhost:<port>/app:1

The port block is derived from the directory name, so two copies of rig never collide — nothing to configure. make check all lists it; bash ctrl/ports.sh persist pins it into ctrl/.env if you want it fixed:

make cluster list                          # every cluster on this machine, with memory
make cluster free                          # stop the others if memory is tight
make cluster down                          # remove this cluster and its registry

The verbs are yours to change. cluster is the script — ctrl/cluster.sh — and every spelling above is a Makefile target that calls it. make kind-up is an alias for make cluster up, kept because the other projects on this machine answer to that spelling and muscle memory spans repos rather than stopping at one. Nothing outside the Makefile reads these names, so rename them, drop the ones you never type, or add whatever your own projects already say: each alias is two lines at the bottom of the file, calling the same script the canonical target does.

make tilt works on a fresh copy, unedited. rig ships ctrl/Tiltfile, and k8s/base already boots, so the dev loop comes up with the two examples running and nothing to configure first.

It hardcodes nothing. It asks ctrl/ports.sh active for this environment's cluster name, kube context, ports and manifest directory — the same values every other rig script resolves through ctrl/lib/config.sh — so a copied and renamed rig deploys into its own cluster with no edits. Every other project here writes its slug into the Tiltfile five or six times by hand, which is exactly the collision kind-config.yaml.tpl exists to avoid.

What it deploys is MANIFESTS_DIR, defaulting to rig's own ctrl/k8s/overlays/dev. Point that at an overlay versioned elsewhere and rig stops owning the manifests.

Replace the examples, then add your images and resources in the two marked sections. The catalogue below them holds the blocks that recur across every project here — docker_build, resource ordering, gateway reload, port-forwards — with the parts that are easy to get wrong already commented.

make help lists every target.

On a machine where Docker really is the only thing installed, make deps has nothing to download with — see BOOTSTRAP.md, which runs the toolchain through the installer container and carries on to scaffolding and running a new project.

One directory is one environment

Copy this directory, rename it, run it. Cluster name, kubectl context, image tags and the host port block all derive from the directory name, so copies never collide and neither one's teardown can touch the other.

A copy of this directory is a sibling of it, named after the environment it models (acme-rig). That is why the ignore rules for copies sit in the parent repo's .gitignore rather than here: a rule in this directory cannot see a directory beside it.

Profiles

rig needs no profile. With none named it runs on built-in defaults: one node, no addons, a local registry, the newest Kubernetes version it pins. A profile is an optional overlay — a file in ctrl/env.d/, named by PROFILE — for when you want different addons or registry.

rig ships examples, not active profiles, because each one is a use case rather than something every rig needs. Copy one to use it:

example	what it changes
client.env.example	images through a mirror of a corporate registry
offline.env.example	air-gapped: everything from a preloaded local registry
data.env.example	databases and a scheduler: postgres, redis, airflow

cp ctrl/env.d/data.env.example ctrl/env.d/data.env
PROFILE=data make cluster up      # installs the profile's addons too
PROFILE=data make check           # what the profile wants, and what exists

The cluster itself is one file, ctrl/k8s/kind-config.yaml.tpl (one node). To change it — more nodes, other port mappings — edit it and make cluster reset. The node count is read back out of it, so there is nothing to drift. The layout under ctrl/k8s/ is the same as every other project here — a kind config, a kustomize base/, an overlays/dev/ — see ctrl/k8s/README.md.

Addons

Each addon is its own idempotent script in ctrl/addons/, and a profile names the ones it wants in ADDONS. Adding one is adding a file — there is no dispatcher to edit.

There is no ingress controller, deliberately. They pin a narrow window of Kubernetes versions, so depending on one would constrain which k8s a rig can be built with — and running a trailing-edge control plane to model a legacy estate is the whole point. Services are reached through MetalLB and type: LoadBalancer, which carries no such constraint and is also what a real cluster does.

Addon	Does
metallb	gives type: LoadBalancer an address it can actually reach
cert-manager	a local CA, so TLS works offline
metrics-server	makes kubectl top work on kind
postgres	database, in the data namespace
redis	cache and broker
airflow	scheduled pipelines; needs postgres and redis

The last three are cabinets: a public service dropped in as-is, the upstream image unmodified, reachable at a known address. A cabinet is declared once and installs on either target — a service.yml composes it for a laptop, and these install the same one here. The names match on purpose: each cabinet carries a rig_addon field pointing at ctrl/addons/<name>.sh.

Plain manifests rather than helm charts, like every other addon: a chart repo is a network dependency, and the offline profile exists precisely so there is a path with none. Images are pinned in ctrl/versions.env and can be preloaded.

Passwords are generated on first install and kept across re-runs, so re-running an addon never rotates a credential out from under something already connected:

kubectl -n data get secret postgres -o jsonpath='{.data.POSTGRES_PASSWORD}' | base64 -d
kubectl -n data port-forward svc/airflow 8080:8080