This document outlines development guidance for contributions to the Sourcegraph Managed Services Platform (MSP).

To get started, please familiarise yourself with the MSP offering by reading Sourcegraph Managed Services Platform (MSP), and read MSP technical details for a high-level overview of MSP components.

Testing environments

Core Services has a test service that provisions several environments for use in testing: MSP Testbed infrastructure operations. Core Services teammates can liberally place these services in “CLI-apply” mode to apply and test changes directly, before a new sg msp release is even merged and published. For more details on how “CLI-apply” mode works, see CLI-apply mode.

From time to time, we may need to test MSP platform changes in a more realistic use case and scenario. In these cases, we may reach out to teams that own test environments and use the above process to test platform changes directly for brief periods of time. This can result in brief breakages that will be communicated and resolved by Core Services.

Things to look out for in development

When building changes for MSP infrastructure, there are several key things to look out for:

1. Terraform resource re-creation: Does this change force a recreation when running terraform plan? This is visible from terraform plan as # forces replacement and ... must be replaced

   1. You can often work around this by changing the naming strategy of the resource based on the configuration that forces a replace, and applying the following in your CDKTF resource configuration:

   Lifecycle: &cdktf.TerraformResourceLifecycle{
     CreateBeforeDestroy: pointers.Ptr(true),
   },
   

2. Add your pro tip here!