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Testing Containerlab#

Containerlab's test program largely consists of:

Integration Tests#

The integration tests are written in RobotFramework and are located in the tests directory. The tests are run using the rf-run command that wraps robot command. The tests are run in a Docker container, so you don't need to install RobotFramework on your local machine.

Local execution#

To execute the integration tests locally you have to install the python environment with the required dependencies. Containerlab uses uv for all things Python, so getting the venv dialed in as as simple as:

uv sync

Usually you would run the tests using the locally built containerlab binary that contains the unreleased changes. The typical workflow then starts with building the containerlab binary:

make build

The newly built binary is located in the bin directory. In order to let the test runner script know where to find the binary, you have to set the CLAB_BIN environment variable before calling the rf-run script:

CLAB_BIN=$(pwd)/bin/containerlab ./tests/rf-run.sh <runtime> <test suite>

Note

The test runner script requires you to specify the runtime as its first argument. The runtime can be either docker or podman. Containerlab primarily uses Docker as the default runtime, hence the number of tests written for docker outnumber the podman tests.

Selecting the test suite#

Containerlab's integration tests are grouped by a topic, and each topic is mapped to a directory under the tests directory and RobotFramework allows for a flexible selection of tests/test suites to run. For example, to run all the smoke test cases, you can use the following command:

CLAB_BIN=$(pwd)/bin/containerlab ./tests/rf-run.sh docker tests/01-smoke

since 01-smoke is a directory containing all the smoke test suites.

Consequently, in order to run a specific test suite you just need to provide a path to it. E.g. running the 01-basic-flow.robot test suite from the 01-smoke directory:

CLAB_BIN=$(pwd)/bin/containerlab ./tests/rf-run.sh docker tests/01-smoke/01-basic-flow.robot

Note

Selecting a specific test case in a test suite is not supported, since test suites are written in a way that test cases depend on previous ones.

Inspecting the test results#

RobotFramework generates a detailed report in HTML and XML formats that can be found in the tests/out directory. The exact paths to the reports are printed to the console after the test run.