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 uses Docker for builds. We develop on Ubuntu 16.04 but other Linux distributions should work (we have not tried OS X). To build Felix, you will need to install:

• 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, run make felix-docker-image, for example, to build the calico/felix container or make help for other options.

How can I run Felix's unit tests?

After installing the prerequisites above, run make ut to run all the tests, make go-ut to run Go tests only or make python-ut to run Python tests.

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 with, for example: docker run --privileged --net=host -e FELIX_LOGSEVERITYSCREEN=INFO calico/felix

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.

Stand-alone bundle

The make pyinstaller target uses PyInstaller to package Felix as a stand-alone bundle containing a Python distribution along with Felix's Python dependencies.

To create a bundle run make pyinstaller.

The bundle will be output to dist/calico-felix.tgz.

Running the bundle requires

• libc version >=2.12
• Linux kernel >=2.6.32 (note: to support containers running on the host, kernel >=3.10 is required)
• iptables, ipset and conntrack (typically from the conntrack-tools package) to be available.

Note: the bundle itself doesn't require Docker.

To use the bundle,

• install the pre-requisites above
• unpack calico-felix.tgz on your target host (/opt/calico-felix would be a good place) and create a start-up script (for example, a systemd unit file or an upstart script) that runs the calico-felix binary found in the unpacked directory. Your start-up script should be set to restart Felix on exit because Felix sometimes needs to restart to pick up configuration changes.