Kata Containers tests

Getting the code
CI Content
Developer Mode

This repository contains various types of tests and utilities (called "content" from now on) for testing the Kata Containers code repositories.

Getting the code

$ go get -d github.com/kata-containers/tests

CI Content

This repository contains a number of scripts that run from under a "CI" (Continuous Integration) system.

Centralised scripts

The CI scripts in this repository are used to test changes to the content of this repository. These scripts are also used by the other Kata Containers code repositories.

The advantages of this approach are:

Functionality is defined once.
- Easy to make changes affecting all code repositories centrally.
Assurance that all the code repositories are tested in this same way.

CI setup

WARNING:

The CI scripts perform a lot of setup before running content under a CI. Some of this setup runs as the root user and could break a developer's system. See Developer Mode.

Detecting a CI system

The strategy to check if the tests are running under a CI system is to see if the CI variable is set to the value true. For example, in shell syntax:

if [ "$CI" = true ]; then
    # Assumed to be running in a CI environment
else
    # Assumed to NOT be running in a CI environment
fi

Breaking Compatibility

In case the patch you submit breaks the CI because it needs to be tested together with a patch from another kata-containers repository, you have to specify which repository and which pull request it depends on.

Using a simple tag Depends-on: in your commit message will allow the CI to run properly. Notice that this tag is parsed from the latest commit of the pull request.

For example:

	Subsystem: Change summary

	Detailed explanation of your changes.

	Fixes: #nnn

	Depends-on:github.com/kata-containers/runtime#999

	Signed-off-by: <contributor@foo.com>

In this example, we tell the CI to fetch the pull request 999 from the runtime repository and use that rather than the master branch when testing the changes contained in this pull request.

Developer Mode

Developers need a way to run as much test content as possible locally, but as explained in CI Setup, running all the content in this repository could be dangerous.

The recommended approach to resolve this issue is to set the following variable to any non-blank value before using any content from this repository:

export KATA_DEV_MODE=true

Setting this variable has the following effects:

Disables content that might not be safe for developers to run locally.
Ignores the effect of the CI variable being set (for extra safety).

You should be aware that setting this variable provides a safe subset of functionality; it is still possible that PRs raised for code repositories will still fail under the automated CI systems since those systems are running all possible tests.

grahamwhaley/kata-containers-tests