Cockpit Starter Kit

Scaffolding for a Cockpit module.

Getting and building the source

Make sure you have npm available (usually from your distribution package). These commands check out the source and build it into the dist/ directory:

git clone https://github.com/cockpit-project/starter-kit.git
cd starter-kit
make

Installing

make install compiles and installs the package in /usr/share/cockpit/. The convenience targets srpm and rpm build the source and binary rpms, respectively. Both of these make use of the dist-gzip target, which is used to generate the distribution tarball. In production mode, source files are automatically minified and compressed. Set NODE_ENV=production if you want to duplicate this behavior.

For development, you usually want to run your module straight out of the git tree. To do that, link that to the location were cockpit-bridge looks for packages:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/cockpit
ln -s `pwd`/dist ~/.local/share/cockpit/starter-kit

After changing the code and running make again, reload the Cockpit page in your browser.

Automated Testing

Run make check to build an RPM, install it into a standard Cockpit test VM (centos-7 by default), and run the test/check-application integration test on it. This uses Cockpit's Chrome DevTools Protocol based browser tests, through a Python API abstraction. Note that this API is not guaranteed to be stable, so if you run into failures and don't want to adjust tests, consider checking out Cockpit's test/common from a tag instead of master (see the test/common target in Makefile).

After the test VM is prepared, you can manually run the test without rebuilding the VM, possibly with extra options for tracing and halting on test failures (for interactive debugging):

TEST_OS=centos-7 test/check-application -tvs

You can also run the test against a different Cockpit image, for example:

TEST_OS=fedora-28 make check

Vagrant

This directory contains a Vagrantfile that installs and starts cockpit on a Fedora 26 cloud image. Run vagrant up to start it and vagrant rsync to synchronize the dist directory to /usr/local/share/cockit/starter-kit. Use vagrant rsync-auto to automatically sync when contents of the dist directory change.

Customizing

After cloning the Starter Kit you should rename the files, package names, and labels to your own project's name. Use these commands to find out what to change:

find -iname '*starter*'
git grep -i starter

Further reading

• The Starter Kit announcement blog post explains the rationale for this project.
• Cockpit Deployment and Developer documentation
• Make your project easily discoverable