Tanzu Community Edition extension for Docker Desktop

This provides an extension integration with Docker Desktop to allow creating a local Tanzu Community Edition unmanaged cluster quickly and easily through the Docker Desktop interface.

Prerequisites

In order to run this extension, you must have Docker Desktop 4.8.0 or later installed.

If you would like to contribute or modify the extension, there are additional requirements. This extension is comprised of Go and React JavaScript code. Building the extension can be done using containerized build tools, but you may want to install development environments for these tools.

Runtime Requirements:

• Docker Desktop 4.8.0 or later

Development Recommendations:

• Go programming language
• React reference
• Docker Extensions CLI

Building and Installing

The standard way to get the Tanzu Community Edition extension for Docker Desktop is by using the Docker Marketplace. This will install the official released version of the extension.

If you are making local changes and would like to try them out, you will need to follow these steps:

1. In Docker Desktop, go to Preferences > Extensions and make sure "Enable Docker Extensions" is checked.

2. From a terminal, navigate to $TCE_REPO/extensions/docker-desktop.

3. Run the following command to build and install the local extension:

   make build-install

4. From the Docker Dashboard you can now navigate to the Extensions section. It should now list Tanzu Community Edition as one of the available extensions. Click on Tanzu Community Edition from the list and you should be presented with the UI for creating and deleting clusters.

Docker Extension CLI Setup

Note: The build steps assume that the Docker Extensions CLI has been installed. While docker-extension can be called directly, the installation target assumes it has been added as a CLI plugin and can be called as docker extension.

If you have downloaded the docker-extension binary from their Releases page, follow these steps to have it recognized as a CLI plugin under docker:

mkdir -p ~/.docker/cli-plugins
cp docker-extension ~/.docker/cli-plugins/

Publishing

The extension uses four "builder" containers for concurrent builds of the Tanzu CLI, the backend utility, the React client, etc.

When building and publishing a new extension image, ensure you have authenticated to the GitHub container registry (ghcr). This is where the multi architecture builder images are stored and pushed to. When building the extension image for multiple architectures, in order to support building from multiple architectures, these builder images are used (and pulled from ghcr) to generate the final image which is then pushed to Dockerhub.

To build everything with a tag, including the extension itself, use:

TCE_CI_BUILD=true TAG=1.2.3 make build-push-everything

Note the TCE_CI_BUILD env var. This is to ensure caution and promote only publishing from CI/CD.

To use existing builder images in ghcr, without going through the processes of rebuilding them and pushing them to ghcr, use:

TCE_CI_BUILD=true TAG=1.2.3 make build-push-extension