How to build istio locally for debugging

 To build istio locally then to debug, you need to setup two environment variables.

 

export TAG=30.1.2
export VERSION=$TAG

Once these two variables set, you can run the following command to build

make docker

If everything run correctly, there should be a list of istio images built, here is an example list

istio/install-cni                                     30.1.2 
istio/operator                                        30.1.2 
istio/istioctl                                        30.1.2 
istio/app_sidecar_centos_7                            30.1.2 
istio/app_sidecar_centos_8                            30.1.2 
istio/app_sidecar_debian_10                           30.1.2 
istio/app_sidecar_debian_9                            30.1.2 
istio/app_sidecar_ubuntu_focal                        30.1.2 
istio/app_sidecar_ubuntu_bionic                       30.1.2 
istio/app_sidecar_ubuntu_xenial                       30.1.2 
istio/app                                             30.1.2 
istio/proxyv2                                         30.1.2 
istio/pilot                                           30.1.2 

After these images are built, upload these images to the cluster where istio will be deployed.

istioctl operator init --tag 30.1.2

If you do not have access to the cluster to upload the images, then you will need to push the images to a docker image repository, then use the following command

istioctl operator init --hub docker.io --tag 30.1.2