Compile and run locally against a remote k8s cluster.
git clone https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/external-dns.git && cd external-dns
make build
# login to remote k8s cluster
./build/external-dns --source=service --provider=inmemory --once
Run linting, unit tests, and coverage report.
make lint
make test
make cover-html
Build container image.
make build.docker
ExternalDNS's sources of DNS records live in package source. They implement the Source interface that has a single method Endpoints which returns the represented source's objects converted to Endpoints. Endpoints are just a tuple of DNS name and target where target can be an IP or another hostname.
For example, the ServiceSource returns all Services converted to Endpoints where the hostname is the value of the external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/hostname annotation and the target is the IP of the load balancer.
This list of endpoints is passed to the Plan which determines the difference between the current DNS records and the desired list of Endpoints.
Once the difference has been figured out the list of intended changes is passed to a Registry which live in the registry package. The registry is a wrapper and access point to DNS provider. Registry implements the ownership concept by marking owned records and filtering out records not owned by ExternalDNS before passing them to DNS provider.
The provider is the adapter to the DNS provider, e.g. Google Cloud DNS. It implements two methods: ApplyChanges to apply a set of changes filtered by Registry and Records to retrieve the current list of records from the DNS provider.
The orchestration between the different components is controlled by the controller.
You can pick which Source and Provider to use at runtime via the --source and --provider flags, respectively.
A typical way to start on, e.g. a CoreDNS provider, would be to add a coredns.go to the providers package and implement the interface methods. Then you would have to register your provider under a name in main.go, e.g. coredns, and would be able to trigger it's functions via setting --provider=coredns.
Note, how your provider doesn't need to know anything about where the DNS records come from, nor does it have to figure out the difference between the current and the desired state, it merely executes the actions calculated by the plan.
You can also extend the CI workflow which is currently implemented as Github Action within the workflow folder. In order to test your changes before committing you can leverage act to run the Github Action locally.
Follow the installation instructions in the nektos/act README.md.
Afterwards just run act within the root folder of the project.
For further usage of act refer to its documentation.