This guide is useful if you intend to contribute on containerd. Thanks for your effort. Every contribution is very appreciated.
This doc includes:
- Getting started with GitHub Codespaces
- Build requirements
- Build the development environment
- Build containerd
- Via docker container
- Testing
To get started, create a codespace for this repository by clicking this 👇
A codespace will open in a web-based version of Visual Studio Code. The dev container is fully configured with software needed for this project and the containerd built. If you use a codespace, then you can directly skip to the testing section of this document.
Note: Dev containers is an open spec which is supported by GitHub Codespaces and other tools.
To build the containerd
daemon, and the ctr
simple test client, the following build system dependencies are required:
- Go 1.22.x or above
- Protoc 3.x compiler and headers (download at the Google protobuf releases page)
- Btrfs headers and libraries for your distribution. Note that building the btrfs driver can be disabled via the build tag
no_btrfs
, removing this dependency.
Note: On macOS, you need a third party runtime to run containers on containerd
First you need to setup your Go development environment. You can follow this
guideline How to write go code and at the
end you have go
command in your PATH
.
You need git
to checkout the source code:
git clone https://github.com/containerd/containerd
For proper results, install the protoc
release into /usr/local
on your build system. When generating source code from .proto
files, containerd may rely on some external protocol buffer files. These external dependencies should be added to the /usr/local/include
directory. To install the appropriate version of protoc
and download any necessary external protocol buffer files on a Linux host, run the install script located at script/setup/install-protobuf
.
To enable optional Btrfs snapshotter, you should have the headers from the Linux kernel 4.12 or later.
The dependency on the kernel headers only affects users building containerd from source.
Users on older kernels may opt to not compile the btrfs support (see BUILDTAGS=no_btrfs
below),
or to provide headers from a newer kernel.
Note The dependency on the Linux kernel headers 4.12 was introduced in containerd 1.7.0-beta.4.
containerd 1.6 has different set of dependencies for enabling btrfs. containerd 1.6 users should refer to https://github.com/containerd/containerd/blob/release/1.6/BUILDING.md#build-the-development-environment
At this point you are ready to build containerd
yourself!
Runc is the default container runtime used by containerd
and is required to
run containerd. While it is okay to download a runc
binary and install that on
the system, sometimes it is necessary to build runc directly when working with
container runtime development. Make sure to follow the guidelines for versioning
in RUNC.md for the best results.
Note: Runc only supports Linux
containerd
uses make
to create a repeatable build flow. It means that you
can run:
cd containerd
make
This is going to build all the project binaries in the ./bin/
directory.
You can move them in your global path, /usr/local/bin
with:
sudo make install
The install prefix can be changed by passing the PREFIX
variable (defaults
to /usr/local
).
Note: if you set one of these vars, set them to the same values on all make stages (build as well as install).
If you want to prepend an additional prefix on actual installation (eg. packaging or chroot install),
you can pass it via DESTDIR
variable:
sudo make install DESTDIR=/tmp/install-x973234/
The above command installs the containerd
binary to /tmp/install-x973234/usr/local/bin/containerd
The current DESTDIR
convention is supported since containerd v1.6.
Older releases was using DESTDIR
for a different purpose that is similar to PREFIX
.
When making any changes to the gRPC API, you can use the installed protoc
compiler to regenerate the API generated code packages with:
make generate
Note: Several build tags are currently available:
no_cri
: A build tag disables building Kubernetes CRI support into containerd. See here for build tags of CRI plugin.- snapshotters (alphabetical order)
no_aufs
: A build tag disables building the aufs snapshot driver. (Ignored since containerd v2.0, as the aufs snapshot driver is no longer supported)no_btrfs
: A build tag disables building the Btrfs snapshot driver.no_devmapper
: A build tag disables building the device mapper snapshot driver.no_zfs
: A build tag disables building the ZFS snapshot driver.- platform
no_systemd
: disables any systemd specific codeFor example, adding
BUILDTAGS=no_btrfs
to your environment before calling the binaries Makefile target will disable the btrfs driver within the containerd Go build.
Vendoring of external imports uses the Go Modules. You need
to use go mod
command to modify the dependencies. After modifition, you should run go mod tidy
and go mod vendor
to ensure the go.mod
, go.sum
files and vendor
directory are up to date.
Changes to these files should become a single commit for a PR which relies on vendored updates.
Please refer to RUNC.md for the currently supported version of runc
that is used by containerd.
Note: On macOS, the containerd daemon can be built and run natively. However, as stated above, runc only supports linux.
You can build static binaries by providing a few variables to make
:
make STATIC=1
Note:
- static build is discouraged
- static containerd binary does not support loading shared object plugins (
*.so
)- static build binaries are not position-independent
Note
The following instructions assume you are at the parent directory of containerd source directory.
You can build containerd
via a Linux-based Docker container using the Docker official golang
image
From the parent directory of containerd
's cloned repo you can run the following command:
docker run -it \
-v ${PWD}/containerd:/src/containerd \
-w /src/containerd golang
This mounts the containerd
repository inside the image at /src/containerd
and, by default, runs a shell at that directory.
Now, you are now ready to follow the build instructions:
To have complete core container runtime, you will need both containerd
and runc
. It is possible to build both of these via Docker container.
You can clone runc
in the same parent directory where you cloned containerd
and you should clone the latest stable version of runc
, e.g. v1.1.13:
git clone --branch <RELEASE_TAG> https://github.com/opencontainers/runc
In our Docker container we will build runc
build, which includes
seccomp, SELinux,
and AppArmor support. Seccomp support
in runc requires libseccomp-dev
as a dependency (AppArmor and SELinux support
do not require external libraries at build time). Refer to RUNC.md
in the docs directory to for details about building runc, and to learn about
supported versions of runc
as used by containerd.
Since we need libseccomp-dev
installed as a dependency, we will need a custom Docker image derived from the official golang
image. You can use the following Dockerfile
to build your custom image:
FROM golang
RUN apt-get update && \
apt-get install -y libseccomp-dev
Let's suppose you've built an image named containerd/build
from the above Dockerfile
.
You can run the following command:
docker run -it \
-v ${PWD}/containerd:/src/containerd \
-v ${PWD}/runc:/src/runc \
-w /src/containerd \
containerd/build
This mounts both runc
and containerd
repositories in our Docker container.
From within the Docker container, let's build containerd
:
make && make install
You can check the installed binaries with:
$ which containerd
/usr/local/bin/containerd
$ containerd --version
containerd github.com/containerd/containerd/v2 v2.0.0-rc.3-195-gf5d5407c2 f5d5407c2ff12865653a9a132d5783196be82763
Next, let's build runc
:
cd /src/runc
make && make install
You can check the installed binaries with:
$ which runc
/usr/local/sbin/runc
$ runc --version
runc version 1.1.13
commit: v1.1.13-0-g58aa9203
spec: 1.0.2-dev
go: go1.23.0
libseccomp: 2.5.4
For further details about building runc, refer to RUNC.md in the docs directory.
When working with ctr
, the simple test client we just built, don't forget to start the daemon!
containerd --config config.toml
During the automated CI the unit tests and integration tests are run as part of the PR validation. As a developer you can run these tests locally by using any of the following Makefile
targets:
make test
: run all non-integration tests that do not requireroot
privilegesmake root-test
: run all non-integration tests which requireroot
make integration
: run all tests, including integration tests and those which requireroot
.TESTFLAGS_PARALLEL
can be used to control parallelism. For example,TESTFLAGS_PARALLEL=1 make integration
will lead a non-parallel execution. The default value ofTESTFLAGS_PARALLEL
is 8.make cri-integration
: CRI Integration Tests run cri integration tests
To execute a specific test or set of tests you can use the go test
capabilities
without using the Makefile
targets. The following examples show how to specify a test
name and also how to use the flag directly against go test
to run root-requiring tests.
# run the test <TEST_NAME>:
go test -v -run "<TEST_NAME>" ./path/to/package
# enable the root-requiring tests:
go test -v -run ./path/to/package -test.root
Example output from directly running go test
to execute the TestContainerList
test:
sudo go test -v -run "TestContainerList" ./integration/client -test.root
=== RUN TestContainerList
--- PASS: TestContainerList (0.00s)
PASS
ok github.com/containerd/containerd/v2/integration/client 2.584s
Note: in order to run
sudo go
you need to
- either keep user PATH environment variable. ex:
sudo "PATH=$PATH" env go test <args>
- or use
go test -exec
ex:go test -exec sudo -v -run "TestTarWithXattr" ./pkg/archive -test.root
In addition to go test
-based testing executed via the Makefile
targets, the containerd-stress
tool is available and built with the all
or binaries
targets and installed during make install
.
With this tool you can stress a running containerd daemon for a specified period of time, selecting a concurrency level to generate stress against the daemon. The following command is an example of having five workers running for two hours against a default containerd gRPC socket address:
containerd-stress -c 5 -d 120m
For more information on this tool's options please run containerd-stress --help
.
Bucketbench is an external tool which can be used to drive load against a container runtime, specifying a particular set of lifecycle operations to run with a specified amount of concurrency. Bucketbench is more focused on generating performance details than simply inducing load against containerd.
Bucketbench differs from the containerd-stress
tool in a few ways:
- Bucketbench has support for testing the Docker engine, the
runc
binary, and containerd 0.2.x (viactr
) and 1.0 (via the client library) branches. - Bucketbench is driven via configuration file that allows specifying a list of lifecycle operations to execute. This can be used to generate detailed statistics per-command (e.g. start, stop, pause, delete).
- Bucketbench generates detailed reports and timing data at the end of the configured test run.
More details on how to install and run bucketbench
are available at the GitHub project page.