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Getting Started - Developers

Introduction

These instructions are for Developers and Contributors to get and run EdgeX Foundry. If you want to get the EdgeX platform and run it (but do not intend to change or add to the existing code base now) then you are considered a "User". Users should read: Getting Started Users)

EdgeX is a collection of more than a dozen micro services that are deployed to provide a minimal edge platform capability. EdgeX consists of a collection of reference implementation services and SDK tools. The micro services and SDKs are written in Go or C. These documentation pages provide a developer with the information and instructions to get and run EdgeX Foundry in development mode - that is running natively outside of containers and with the intent of adding to or changing the existing code base.

What You Need

Hardware

EdgeX Foundry is an operating system (OS) and hardware (HW)-agnostic edge software platform. See the reference page for platform requirements. These provide guidance on a minimal platform to run the EdgeX platform. However, as a developer, you may find that additional memory, disk space, and improved CPU are essential to building and debugging.

Software

Developers need to install the following software to get, run and develop EdgeX Foundry micro services:

Git

Use this free and open source version control (SVC) system to download (and upload) the EdgeX Foundry source code from the project's GitHub repositories. See https://git-scm.com/downloads for download and install instructions. Alternative tools (Easy Git for example) could be used, but this document assumes use of git and leaves how to use alternative SVC tools to the reader.

Redis

By default, EdgeX Foundry uses Redis (version 5 starting with the Geneva release) as the persistence mechanism for sensor data as well as metadata about the devices/sensors that are connected. See https://redis.io/ for download and installation instructions.

MongoDB

As an alternative, EdgeX Foundry allows use of MongoDB (version 4.2 as of Geneva) as the alternative persistence mechanism in place of Redis for sensor data as well as metadata about the connected devices/sensors. See https://www.mongodb.com/download-center?jmp=nav#community for download and installation instructions.

Warning

Use of MongoDB is deprecated with the Geneva release. EdgeX will remove MongoDB support in a future release. Developers should start to migrate to Redis in all development efforts targeting future EdgeX releases.

ZeroMQ

Several EdgeX Foundry services depend on ZeroMQ for communications by default. See the installation for your OS.

The easiest way to get and install ZeroMQ on Linux is to use this setup script: https://gist.github.com/katopz/8b766a5cb0ca96c816658e9407e83d00.

Note

The 0MQ install script above assumes bash is available on your system and the bash executable is in /usr/bin. Before running the script at the link, run 

which bash
at your Linux terminal to insure that bash is in /usr/bin. If not, change the first line of the script so that it points to the correct location of bash.

For MacOS, use brew to install ZeroMQ. 

brew install zeromq

For directions installing ZeroMQ on Windows, please see the Windows documentation: https://github.com/edgexfoundry/edgex-go/blob/master/ZMQWindows.md

Docker (Optional)

If you intend to create Docker images for your updated or newly created EdgeX services, you need to install Docker. See https://docs.docker.com/install/ to learn how to install Docker. If you are new to Docker, the same web site provides you educational information.

Additional Programming Tools and Next Steps

Depending on which part of EdgeX you work on, you need to install one or more programming languages (Go Lang, Gnu C, etc.) and associated tooling. These tools are covered under the documentation specific to each type of development.

Versioning

Please refer to the EdgeX Foundry versioning policy for information on how EdgeX services are released and how EdgeX services are compatible with one another. Specifically, device services (and the associated SDK), application services (and the associated app functions SDK), and client tools (like the EdgeX CLI and UI) can have independent minor releases, but these services must be compatible with the latest major release of EdgeX.

Long Term Support

Please refer to the EdgeX Foundry LTS policy for information on support of EdgeX releases. The EdgeX community does not offer support on any non-LTS release outside of the latest release.