mesh

Mesh is a tool for building distributed applications.

Mesh implements a gossip protocol that provide membership, unicast, and broadcast functionality with eventually-consistent semantics. In CAP terms, it is AP: highly-available and partition-tolerant.

Mesh works in a wide variety of network setups, including thru NAT and firewalls, and across clouds and datacenters. It works in situations where there is only partial connectivity, i.e. data is transparently routed across multiple hops when there is no direct connection between peers. It copes with partitions and partial network failure. It can be easily bootstrapped, typically only requiring knowledge of a single existing peer in the mesh to join. It has built-in shared-secret authentication and encryption. It scales to on the order of 100 peers, and has no dependencies.

Using

Mesh is currently distributed as a Go package. See the API documentation.

We plan to offer Mesh as a standalone service + an easy-to-use API. We will support multiple deployment scenarios, including as a standalone binary, as a container, as an ambassador or sidecar component to an existing container, and as an infrastructure service in popular platforms.

Developing

Mesh builds with the standard Go tooling. You will need to put the repository in Go's expected directory structure; i.e., $GOPATH/src/github.com/weaveworks/mesh.

Building

If necessary, you may fetch the latest version of all of the dependencies into your GOPATH via

go get -d -u -t ./...

Build the code with the usual

go install ./...

Testing

Assuming you've fetched dependencies as above,

go test ./...

Dependencies

Mesh is a library, designed to be imported into a binary package. Vendoring is currently the best way for binary package authors to ensure reliable, reproducible builds. Therefore, we strongly recommend our users use vendoring for all of their dependencies, including Mesh. To avoid compatibility and availability issues, Mesh doesn't vendor its own dependencies, and doesn't recommend use of third-party import proxies.

There are several tools to make vendoring easier, including gb, gvt, glide, and govendor.

Workflow

Mesh follows a typical PR workflow. All contributions should be made as pull requests that satisfy the guidelines, below.

Guidelines

• All code must abide Go Code Review Comments
• Names should abide What's in a name
• Code must build on both Linux and Darwin, via plain go build
• Code should have appropriate test coverage, invoked via plain go test

In addition, several mechanical checks are enforced. See the lint script for details.

Getting Help

If you have any questions about, feedback for or problems with mesh:

• Invite yourself to the Weave Users Slack.
• Ask a question on the #general slack channel.
• File an issue.

Your feedback is always welcome!