Skip to content

What is Chainsaw

Overview

Chainsaw provides a declarative approach to testing production-grade Kubernetes operators and controllers.

It provides a way to inject an operator (subject under test) during the setup and allows tests to be standard YAML files.

In Chainsaw everything is YAML. We use YAML to manipulate resources, define cluster state assertions, describe commands to run, etc... Everything is declarative.

Motivation

Testing Kubernetes operators is not easy.

At Kyverno we are building complex controllers and admission controllers that need to be deeply end to end tested.

Advantages of a declarative approach

It made sense to be able to declaratively create end to end tests for a couple of reasons:

  • Easily translate a reported issue to an end to end test
  • Add new end to end tests without writing a single line of code

When would you use Chainsaw

The testing eco-system is vast and includes at a minimum low level unit tests, integration tests and end-to-end testing.

Chainsaw is built to support some kubernetes integration test scenarios and is most valuable as an end to end testing tool.

Chainsaw is great for

  • Provide tests against your Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs)
  • Inject a controller and assert states in a running cluster
  • Run same tests against multiple implementations and multiple versions of Kubernetes clusters