LearnEnvoy

LearnEnvoy is a community content site that helps organizations get the most out of the Envoy proxy.

The goal of LearnEnvoy is to help developers go from “hey, Envoy sounds powerful” to a fully-functional production deployment.

The content is based on real production deployments, successes and failures, and interviews with teams running Envoy at scale. The guides cover everything from the configuration basics to strategies for distributed system resilience.

Project Background

LearnEnvoy was originally developed at Turbine Labs. It was started based on the experiences building Houston, a control plane, management UI, and observability platform for Envoy.

We open-sourced this site because we know we’re not always right, and even if we are, Envoy and its best practices are evolving faster than any single organization can keep up. Feel free to fork it, edit it, share it with others, and contribute back to it.

Contributing

Want to contribute a change? Great! Here are a few ways you can jump in:

• Be sure to read our Code of Conduct
• Browse our open issues
• Suggest a new section or area for improvement by opening an issue

If you’re running Envoy at your company and want your success story told, send an email to hello@turbinelabs.io. We’d love to interview you and post your experience on the site.

Running LearnEnvoy.io

Prerequisites

Git-lfs

Before cloning the repo, you’ll need to install git-lfs. Otherwise you won’t be able to see any of the images.

Ruby

Jekyll is built with ruby. There are many ways to install ruby on a mac. Pick the one that is least infuriating to you. Using homebrew is a fine answer. You’ll also need gems (installed with ruby if you’re using homebrew) and bundler, because how else are you going to gem up your gems. Then we wrap it all with make because we have to hoist some javascript out of the gems directory. It’s beautiful.

brew install ruby
gem install bundler

then verify you have reasonably modern versions

> ruby -v
ruby 2.4.0p0 (2016-12-24 revision 57164) [x86_64-darwin16]
> bundle -v
Bundler version 1.14.6

Now, from within this project directory run

bundle

To make sure your Gems are packaged up correctly for running jekyll

Building the site

To serve the site for local development, run

make serve

Then go to http://localhost:4000

To build the site for distribution run

make build

And gzip or whatever all the stuff in _site.

Site Architecture

Theme

We use the agency theme for the site. Styling overrides are in assets/main.scss and in the _sass directory. We have copied all of the scss assets from the gem, so we shouldn’t have to worry about order of application from the gem and our thing (non-gem files should take precedence)

Topics

The main page is organized along a series of topics. Topics are defined in four places (gross).

1. _includes/nav.html defines the topmost nav. Each section needs an entry here
2. _layouts/main.html has an include for each topic
3. _includes/<topic>.html controls rendering for the topic
4. _data/<topic>.yaml provides a structured “database” of entries in a topic

Articles

If an item in _data/<topic>.yaml contains an article field, jekyll will look for a corresponding markdown file in the _articles subdirectory. Articles are rendered with the layout in _layouts/article.html. see _data/getting-started.yaml for a very slim example for the ‘on your laptop’ article.