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The Things Network Stack for LoRaWAN Development

The Things Network Stack components are primarily built in Go, while we use Node for web front-ends. It is assumed that you have decent knowledge and experience with these technologies. If you want to get more familiar with Go, we strongly recommend to take A Tour of Go.

Development Environment

The Things Network's development environment heavily relies on make. Under the hood, make calls other tools such as git, go, yarn etc. Recent versions are supported; Node v10.x and Go v1.12.x. Let's first make sure you have go, node and yarn:

On macOS using Homebrew:

brew install go node yarn

On Ubuntu (or on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux):

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential nodejs

curl -sSL https://dl.google.com/go/go1.12.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz | sudo tar -xz -C /usr/local
sudo ln -s /usr/local/go/bin/* /usr/local/bin

Cloning the repository

If you are unfamiliar with forking projects on GitHub or cloning them locally, please see the GitHub documentation.

Getting started

As most of the tasks will be managed by make we will first initialize the tooling. You might want to run this commands from time to time:

make init

For convenience, you can initialize the development databases with some defaults.

Note: this requires Docker Desktop.

make dev.stack.init

This starts a CockroachDB and Redis database in Docker containers, creates a database, migrates tables and creates a user admin with password admin.

Managing the development databases

You can also use the following commands to start, stop and erase databases.

make dev.databases.start # Starts all databases in a Docker container
make dev.databases.stop  # Stops all databases

# The contents of the databases will be saved in .dev/data.

make dev.databases.erase # Stop all databases and erase storage.

CockroachDB

CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database that we use in the Identity Server.

You can use make dev.databases.sql to enter an SQL shell.

Redis

Redis is an in-memory data store that we use as a database for "hot" data.

You can use make dev.databases.redis-cli to enter a Redis-CLI shell.

Testing

make test

Building

There is a single binary for the server, ttn-lw-stack, as well as a binary for the command-line interface ttn-lw-cli. The single binary contains all components start one or multiple components. This allows you to run the stack with one command in simple deployment scenarios, as well as distributing micro-services for more advanced scenarios.

We provide binary releases for all supported platforms, including packages for various package managers at https://github.com/TheThingsNetwork/lorawan-stack/releases. We suggest you use the compiled packages we provide in production scenarios.

For development/testing purposes we suggest either running required binaries via go run (e.g. go run ./cmd/ttn-lw-cli from repository root for CLI), or using go build directly. Note, that frontend (if used) needs to be built manually via make js.build before go build or go run commands are run.

If you must, you can build all arifacts with the following command:

make clean build-all

Note: You will at least need to have rpm and snapcraft in your PATH.

This will compile the front-end in public, the binaries for all supported platforms, deb, rpm and Snapcraft packages, release archives in dist, as well as Docker images.

Note: The operating system and architecture represent the name of the directory in dist in which the binaries are placed. For example, the binaries for Darwin x64 (macOS) will be located at dist/darwin_amd64.

Releasing

Releasing a new version consists of the following steps:

  1. Bumping the version
  2. Writing the version files
  3. Creating the version bump commit
  4. Creating the version tag
  5. Building the release and pushing to package managers (this is done by CI)
  6. Edit the release notes

Our development tooling helps with this process. The mage command has the following commands for version bumps:

version:bumpMajor      bumps a major version (from 3.4.5 -> 4.0.0).
version:bumpMinor      bumps a minor version (from 3.4.5 -> 3.5.0).
version:bumpPatch      bumps a patch version (from 3.4.5 -> 3.4.6).
version:bumpRC         bumps a release candidate version (from 3.4.5-rc1 -> 3.4.5-rc2).
version:bumpRelease    bumps a pre-release to a release version (from 3.4.5-rc1 -> 3.4.5).

These bumps can be combined (i.e. version:bumpMinor version:bumpRC bumps 3.4.5 -> 3.5.0-rc1). Apart from these bump commands, we have commands for writing version files (version:files), creating the bump commit (version:commitBump) and the version tag (version:tag).

A typical release process is executed directly on the master branch and looks like this:

mage version:bumpPatch version:files version:commitBump version:tag // bump, write files, commit and tag.
git push origin $(mage version:current) // push the tag
git push origin master // push the master branch

Note that you must have sufficient repository rights to push to master.

After pushing the tag, our CI system will start building the release. When this is done, you'll find a new release on the releases page. After this is done, you'll need to edit the release notes. The release process will do its best to generate release notes for us, but they typically require a bit of editing.

API

Note: If you don't work on changes in the API you can skip this section.

Our APIs are defined in .proto files in the api folder. These files describe the messages and interfaces of the different components of the Stack. If this is the first time you hear the term "protocol buffers" you should probably read the protocol buffers documentation before you continue.

From the .proto files, we generate code using the protoc compiler. As we plan to compile to a number of different languages, we decided to put the compiler and its dependencies in a Docker image, so make sure you have Docker installed before you try to compile them.

The actual commands for compilation are handled by our Makefile, so the only thing you have to execute, is:

make protos.clean protos

Folder Structure

.
├── .editorconfig       configuration for your editor, see editorconfig.org
├── CODEOWNERS          maintainers of folders who are required to approve pull requests
├── CONTRIBUTING.md     guidelines for contributing: branching, commits, code style, etc.
├── DEVELOPMENT.md      guide for setting up your development environment
├── docker-compose.yml  deployment file (including databases) for Docker Compose
├── Dockerfile          formula for building Docker images
├── LICENSE             the license that explains what you're allowed to do with this code
├── Makefile            dev/test/build tooling
├── README.md           general information about this project
│   ...
├── api                 contains the protocol buffer definitions for our API
├── cmd                 contains the different binaries that form the TTN stack for LoRaWAN
│   ├── internal        contains internal files shared between the different binaries
│   │   ...
│   ├── ttn-lw-cli      the command-line-interface for the TTN stack for LoRaWAN
│   └── ttn-lw-stack    bundles the server binaries that form the TTN stack for LoRaWAN
├── config              configuration for our JavaScript SDK and frontend
├── doc                 detailed documentation on the workings of the TTN stack for LoRaWAN
├── pkg                 contains all libraries used in the TTN stack for LoRaWAN
│   ├── component       contains the base component; all other components extend this component
│   ├── config          package for configuration using config files, environment and CLI flags
│   ├── errors          package for rich errors that include metadata and cross API boundaries
│   ├── log             package for logging
│   ├── messages        contains non-proto messages (such as the messages that are sent over MQTT)
│   ├── metrics         package for metrics collection
│   ├── ttnpb           contains generated code from our protocol buffer definitions and some helper functions
│   ├── types           contains primitive types
│   └── ...
├── public              frontend code will be compiled to this folder - not added to git
├── release             binaries will be compiled to this folder - not added to git
└── sdk                 source code for our SDKs
    └── js              source code for our JavaScript SDK