Development setup

Building and running Tetragon

For local development, you will likely want to build and run bare-metal Tetragon.

Requirements

• A Go toolchain with the version specified in the main go.mod;
• GNU make;
• A running Docker service (you can use Podman as well);
• The docker-buildx-plugin (you may already have this);
• For building tests, libcap and libelf (in Debian systems, e.g., install libelf-dev and libcap-dev).

Build everything

You can build most Tetragon targets as follows (this can take time as it builds all the targets needed for testing, see minimal build):

make

If you want to use podman instead of docker, you can do the following (assuming you need to use sudo with podman):

CONTAINER_ENGINE='sudo podman' make

You can ignore /bin/sh: docker: command not found in the output.

To build using the local clang, you can use:

CONTAINER_ENGINE='sudo podman' LOCAL_CLANG=1 LOCAL_CLANG_FORMAT=1 make

See Dockerfile.clang for the minimal required version of clang.

Minimal build

To build the tetragon binary, the BPF programs and the tetra CLI binary you can use:

make tetragon tetragon-bpf tetra

Run Tetragon

You should now have a ./tetragon binary, which can be run as follows:

sudo ./tetragon --bpf-lib bpf/objs

Notes:

1. The --bpf-lib flag tells Tetragon where to look for its compiled BPF programs (which were built in the make step above).

2. If Tetragon fails with an error "BTF discovery: candidate btf file does not exist", then make sure that your kernel support BTF, otherwise place a BTF file where Tetragon can read it and specify its path with the --btf flag. See more about that in the FAQ.

Building and running a Docker image

The base kernel should support BTF or a BTF file should be bind mounted on top of /var/lib/tetragon/btf inside container.

To build Tetragon image:

make image

To run the image:

docker run --name tetragon \
   --rm -it -d --pid=host \
   --cgroupns=host --privileged \
   -v /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux:/var/lib/tetragon/btf \
   cilium/tetragon:latest

Run the tetra binary to get Tetragon events:

docker exec -it tetragon \
   bash -c "/usr/bin/tetra getevents -o compact"

Building and running as a systemd service

To build Tetragon tarball:

make tarball

Running Tetragon in kind

This command will setup tetragon, kind cluster and install tetragon in it. Ensure docker, kind, kubectl, and helm are installed.

# Setup tetragon on kind
make kind-setup

Verify that Tetragon is installed by running:

kubectl get pods -n tetragon

Local Development in Vagrant Box

If you are on an intel Mac, use Vagrant to create a dev VM:

vagrant up
vagrant ssh
make

If you are getting an error, you can try to run sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.virtualbox.startup.plist (from a Stackoverflow answer).

Local Development with Apple Silicon Mac

Use Lima to create a Linux VM if you are using a Mac with Apple silicon. For example:

First create a VM using Lima:

brew install lima
limactl create --mount-writable --tty=false --name=tetragon
limactl start tetragon
limactl shell tetragon

Then install needed dependencies inside the VM:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:longsleep/golang-backports
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y golang-1.23 libelf-dev libcap-dev make
export CONTAINER_ENGINE=nerdctl
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/go-1.23/bin

You can now build Tetragon in your VM:

make -j3 tetragon-bpf tetragon tetra

What’s next

• See how to make your first changes.