Share Your Meshery Models

Participating in the Meshery Catalog is an excellent opportunity to enhance and share your cloud-native configurations with the community. By contributing your models and patterns, you not only showcase your work but also empower others to leverage your innovations. This guide provides a defined approach to using mesheryctl for uploading your models and patterns to the Catalog, ensuring a smooth and efficient contribution process.

Understanding Components and Models

Before we dive into the contribution process, let’s understand two key concepts:

Models in Meshery

Models are packages that organize resources (apps, services, infrastructure) for easy management. They are:

Portable, versioned units
OCI-compatible images that can be imported/exported
Containers for components, policies, and connections

Components in Meshery

Components represent entities in the Meshery ecosystem, exposing capabilities of the underlying platform. They can be:

Registered, created, and used by users and operators
Defined through definitions, instances, and associated metadata
Identified by their kind, apiVersion, and model.name attributes (components sharing these are considered duplicates)

Contributing with mesheryctl

Generate a Model from Google Sheets
If your configurations are stored in Google Sheets, you can import them directly into the Catalog with:

mesheryctl registry generate
 --spreadsheet-id "1DZHnzxYWOlJ69Oguz4LkRVTFM79kC2tuvdwizOJmeMw"
 --spreadsheet-cred "[spreadsheet-credential-file]"

Generate Models Using Connection and Credential Definitions
For other supported sources, you can specify a connection and credential file to generate models:
```
mesheryctl registry generate
 --registrant-def [path-to-connection-definition]
 --registrant-cred [path-to-credential-definition]
```

Upload a Specific Model from Google Sheets
To upload just one model from Google Sheets, use:

mesheryctl registry generate
 --spreadsheet-id "1DZHnzxYWOlJ69Oguz4LkRVTFM79kC2tuvdwizOJmeMw"
 --spreadsheet-cred "[spreadsheet-credential-file]"
 --model "[model-name]"

Import Models from Local CSV Files
Download model and component CSV templates, place them in a local folder, then run:
```
mesheryctl registry generate
 --directory "[local-path-to-directory]"
```
This will generate the model as a package - .tar file.
Test Locally and Submit
After generating and testing your models (you can import them into your account by using the Import button located on playground.meshery.io under Settings > Registry > Models or by running the command below):
```
mesheryctl model import
 -f "[local-path-to-model-tar-file]"
```
Submit a pull request by first forking the meshery/meshery.io repository on GitHub and adding the tar file to the collections/_models/ folder.

Model Generation Wizard Tool (Coming Soon)

A new Model Generation Wizard Tool is coming soon to simplify these steps, making it even easier to add your work to the Meshery Catalog.

By contributing, you help the community save time and standardize configurations!