kryndex / felix

Project Calico's per-host agent Felix, responsible for programming routes and security policy.

Project Calico

Note that the documentation in this repo is targeted at Calico contributors.

Documentation for Calico users is here:
http://docs.projectcalico.org

This repository contains the source code for Project Calico's per-host daemon, Felix.

How can I get support for contributing to Project Calico?

The best place to ask a question or get help from the community is the calico-users #slack. We also have an IRC channel.

Who is behind Project Calico?

Tigera, Inc. is the company behind Project Calico and is responsible for the ongoing management of the project. However, it is open to any members of the community – individuals or organizations – to get involved and contribute code.

Contributing

Thanks for thinking about contributing to Project Calico! The success of an open source project is entirely down to the efforts of its contributors, so we do genuinely want to thank you for even thinking of contributing.

Before you do so, you should check out our contributing guidelines in the CONTRIBUTING.md file, to make sure it's as easy as possible for us to accept your contribution.

How do I build Felix?

Felix mostly uses Docker for builds. We develop on Ubuntu 16.04 but other Linux distributions should work (there are known Makefile that prevent building on OS X).
To build Felix, you will need:

• A suitable linux box.
• To check out the code into your GOPATH.
• Docker >=1.12
• GNU make.
• Plenty of disk space (since the builds use some heavyweight full-OS containers in order to build debs and RPMs).

Then, as a one-off, run

make update-tools

which will install a couple more go tools that we haven't yet containerised.

Then, to build the calico-felix binary:

make bin/calico-felix

or, the calico/felix docker image:

make calico/felix

How can I run Felix's unit tests?

To run all the UTs:

make ut

To start a ginkgo watch, which will re-run the relevant UTs as you update files:

make ut-watch

To get coverage stats:

make cover-report

or

make cover-browser

How can a subset of the go unit tests?

If you want to be able to run unit tests for specific packages for more iterative development, you'll need to install

• GNU make
• go >=1.7

then run make update-tools to install ginkgo, which is the test tool used to run Felix's unit tests.

There are several ways to run ginkgo. One option is to change directory to the package you want to test, then run ginkgo. Another is to use ginkgo's watch feature to monitor files for changes:

cd go
ginkgo watch -r

Ginkgo will re-run tests as files are modified and saved.

How do I build packages/run Felix?

Docker

After building the docker image (see above), you can run Felix and log to screen with, for example:

docker run --privileged \
           --net=host \
           -v /run:/run \
           -e FELIX_LOGSEVERITYSCREEN=INFO \
           calico/felix

Notes:

• --privileged is required because Felix needs to execute iptables and other privileged commands.
• --net=host is required so that Felix can manipulate the routes and iptables tables in the host namespace (outside its container).
• -v /run:/run is required so that Felix shares the global iptables file lock with other processes; this allows Felix and other daemons that manipulate iptables to avoid clobbering each other's updates.
• -e FELIX_LOGSEVERITYSCREEN=INFO tells Felix to log at info level to stderr.

Debs and RPMs

The Makefile has targets for building debs and RPMs for different platforms. By using docker, the build does not need to be run on the target platform.

make deb
make rpm

The packages (and source packages) are output to the dist directory.