Local Debug Environment

The Tilt setup can scale the in-cluster controller to zero replicas so you can run the manager locally in a debugger, attached to the same Kind cluster. This lets you set breakpoints and step through reconciliation while all other resources (CRDs, cert-manager, Prometheus, sample CRs) still live in the cluster.

Prerequisites

• Kind, Tilt, and kubectl installed
• An IDE with a Go debugger (the repo ships a VS Code launch.json)

Starting Tilt in debug mode

make tilt-debug-up

This sets DEBUG=true and runs make tilt-up, which creates the Kind cluster if needed. In debug mode the Tiltfile:

• Scales the network-operator-controller-manager Deployment to replicas: 0, freeing the cluster to be reconciled by your locally running manager instead.
• Applies the Device sample verbatim (skipping the host.docker.internal address rewrite used by the normal in-cluster flow).
• Update the config/samples/device_v1alpha1_device.yaml file to point to a real device on your network to test against a real device.

Everything else — CRDs, cert-manager, Prometheus, and the manually triggered sample resources — is deployed exactly as in a normal make tilt-up run.

Launching the debugger

With Tilt running, start the manager from your IDE. In VS Code, add a launch configuration to .vscode/launch.json:

{
  "name": "Kind Debug",
  "type": "go",
  "request": "launch",
  "mode": "debug",
  "program": "${workspaceFolder}/cmd",
  "env": {
    "KUBECONFIG": "${workspaceFolder}/.vscode/network-kind.kubeconfig",
    "ENABLE_WEBHOOKS": "false"
  },
  "args": [
    "--max-concurrent-reconciles",
    "10",
    "--provider",
    "openconfig",
    "--requeue-interval",
    "30s"
  ]
}

Key settings:

• KUBECONFIG points at the Kind cluster (export the kubeconfig with kind get kubeconfig --name network-operator > .vscode/network-kind.kubeconfig).
• ENABLE_WEBHOOKS=false — webhooks require the in-cluster certificate setup, so they are disabled when debugging locally.
• --provider, --max-concurrent-reconciles, and --requeue-interval match the flags the in-cluster manager runs with. Adjust --provider to the platform you are targeting.

Pick this configuration in the Run and Debug view and start it. Set breakpoints in the controller or provider code and trigger a sample resource in the Tilt UI to hit them.