Running tests

Tetragon has several types of tests:

• Go tests, composed of unit tests for userspace Go code and Go and BPF code.
• BPF unit tests, testing specifing BPF functions.
• E2E tests, for end-to-end tests, installing Tetragon in Kubernetes clusters and checking for specific features.

Those tests are running in the Tetragon CI on various kernels¹ and various architectures (amd64 and arm64).

Go tests

To run the Go tests locally, you can use:

make test

Use EXTRA_TESTFLAGS to add flags to the go test command.

Test specific kernels

To run the Go tests on various kernel versions, we use vmtests with cilium/little-vm-helper in the CI, you can also use it locally for testing specific kernels. See documentation github.com/cilium/tetragon/tests/vmtests.

BPF unit tests

To run BPF unit tests, you can use:

make bpf-test

Those tests can be found under github.com/cilium/tetragon/bpf/tests. The framework uses Go tests with cilium/ebpf to run those tests, you can use BPFGOTESTFLAGS to add go test flags, like make BPFGOTESTFLAGS="-v" bpf-test.

E2E tests

To run E2E tests, you can use:

make e2e-test

This will build the Tetragon image and use the e2e framework to create a kind cluster, install Tetragon and run the tests. To not rebuild the image before running the test, use E2E_BUILD_IMAGES=0. You can use EXTRA_TESTFLAGS to add flags to the go test command.

What’s next

• See how to submit your first pull request.