cozystack/docs/agents/e2e-testing.md

E2E Testing Conventions

Guidance for writing, changing, and reviewing Cozystack's end-to-end (E2E) tests and the CI that runs them. Read this before touching anything under hack/e2e-chainsaw/, the bootstrap/OpenAPI BATS (hack/e2e-*.bats), hack/*.sh test helpers, either E2E CI workflow (.github/workflows/pull-requests.yaml for same-repo pull requests, .github/workflows/e2e-fork.yaml for forks), or packages/core/testing/. §10 covers how the two split the work and which invariants hold them together.

The app suite is Kyverno Chainsaw (hack/e2e-chainsaw/, one directory per app, each with a chainsaw-test.yaml). Cluster bootstrap (hack/e2e-install-cozystack.bats, hack/e2e-prepare-cluster.bats) and the OpenAPI checks (hack/e2e-test-openapi.bats) remain BATS.

The core principle

Retries do not recover flakes — they hide deterministic bugs and triple diagnostic wall-time. An audit of 30 PR runs found that across sampled failures, 25/25 retry attempts failed: the retry loop never once turned a red run green, it only delayed surfacing real bugs (Helm namespace conflicts, seaweedfs/harbor races, a vminstance disk race) that looked like flakes because the retry sometimes coincided with transient state clearing.

Every convention below follows from that finding: fail fast, fail loud, make the failure legible. A test that flakes is a test (or a product) with a real race to fix, not a test to wrap in a retry. Chainsaw's per-assertion polling is the structural expression of this: each assert waits on its own condition to its own timeout, and a failure is reported as a structured diff plus auto-captured events/describe/logs — not a generic non-zero exit.

Conventions

1. No retries on deterministic steps; retry only pure infrastructure

• Run E2E tests and Install Cozystack run once. On failure they print ❌ ... (no retry — see diagnostics below) and dump state. Do not reintroduce a retry loop around them. The E2E step is a single chainsaw test invocation — there is no per-app retry loop to bring back, because Chainsaw already polls each assertion to its own timeout.
• Prepare environment keeps its 3× retry — and only it — because it is pure infrastructure (Talos image download, sandbox VM boot, network) where a transient runner hiccup is a genuine flake with no application logic involved.
• Rule of thumb: retry is justified only for a step that contains no product or test logic.

2. Prefer declarative asserts over imperative waits

A Chainsaw assert polls until the resource matches its expected shape or the per-operation timeout fires, so it subsumes both "the resource exists" and "the field/condition reached this value" in one operation — the old until kubectl get …; do sleep 2; done existence backstop followed by kubectl wait --for=… is no longer needed.

- assert:
    timeout: 6m
    resource:
      apiVersion: helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v2
      kind: HelmRelease
      metadata:
        name: postgres-test
      status:
        (conditions[?type == 'Ready']):
        - status: "True"

• Condition checks use the filter-as-list form (conditions[?type == 'Ready']). Chainsaw v0.2.15 throws "field not found" on the indexed (...)[0] form.
• Imperative checks that no Kubernetes API condition models — S3 reachability through a port-forward, an external LB HTTP path, MetalLB advertisement — stay in a script step. A bare sleep N inside such a script is allowed only when nothing better models the wait; annotate it with a TODO(e2e-replace-fixed-timeouts): comment. The bootstrap BATS (hack/e2e-install-cozystack.bats, hack/e2e-chainsaw/_lib/run-kubernetes.sh) carries the sanctioned until kubectl get exceptions.
• A measurement interval is not one of those waits and does not take the marker. The rule above governs a sleep standing in for a condition nobody wrote a wait for, and the marker means "replace this once something models it". A gap between two readings of a cumulative counter models nothing and is the quantity itself: the diagnostics phase in hack/e2e-chainsaw/_lib/run-kubernetes.sh reads the tenant worker CPU counters and the sandbox nodes' /proc/stat on either side of one COZY_DIAG_RATE_INTERVAL wait, because a single reading of a counter that accumulates from container start is an average over the whole uptime and no rate at all. There is no event to wait for instead, so a TODO there would promise a replacement that cannot exist. Carve-outs are named here rather than judged case by case, and this is the only measurement-interval one.

3. Let Chainsaw own cleanup; no test-level EXIT/RETURN traps

Trap-based cleanup was the single biggest source of false failures in the BATS suite: an EXIT trap ran cleanup in a context where shell variables were unset, set -u killed it, and a successful test was marked failed — then retried twice into real failures.

• Chainsaw deletes the resources it apply-ed during its cleanup phase (bounded by the delete/cleanup timeouts in hack/e2e-chainsaw/.chainsaw.yaml). Do not hand-roll teardown for resources Chainsaw created.
• A self-contained trap '… ' EXIT inside a single script step — to kill a port-forward or remove a temp dir — is fine, because it runs in a contained subprocess with its variables in scope. See hack/e2e-chainsaw/bucket/chainsaw-test.yaml. What is banned is test-level trap-based cleanup of the BATS kind. The same carve-out holds inside a BATS @test when the trap sits in an explicit subshell — ( … trap "kill $pid" EXIT … ) — because a subshell trap does not replace the one the bats binary installs, so a failure inside it still prints its not ok. hack/e2e-test-openapi.bats relies on this to kill a backgrounded kubectl proxy; moving that cleanup to the end of the body would leak a process holding a fixed port rather than fix anything.
• The ban extends to every BATS file under hack/, subdirectories and the e2e- prefixed ones included, for a second reason worth knowing before you debug one: an EXIT trap inside an @test body replaces the one the bats binary installs for its own bookkeeping, and a test that then fails prints no TAP line at all. It does not appear as not ok; it disappears, and the run ends with # bats warning: Executed N instead of expected M tests and a non-zero exit. Verified with Bats 1.14.0. Anyone reading the tail of the output, or grepping it for not ok, sees a green suite — and the CI runner hack/cozytest.sh, which is not the bats binary, reports the same failure correctly, so the two disagree exactly when it matters. Clean up at the end of the test body instead: both runners set -e, so the cleanup is unreachable on failure and the scratch directory is left behind for inspection, which is what you want from a failed test anyway. When a suite reports zero failures, confirm it also reports how many tests it ran: an exit code answers "did anything fail", never "did anything run". hack/bats-no-exit-trap.bats enforces this across every hack/**/*.bats, subdirectories included: a file that carries no # EXIT-TRAP DEBT: N comment must contain no EXIT-trap line at all, and a file that carries one must install exactly N — so a trap appearing or disappearing fails until the file's own number is corrected. Note what that does and does not buy: it is a ratchet on the number's accuracy, not on the debt itself, because adding a trap and raising N in the same change is green. Nothing mechanical stops the count growing — review does, which is the point of the number living in the file being reviewed. A trap inside an explicit subshell is exempt from the ban but still counted, so a declaration is not by itself an admission of debt; hack/e2e-test-openapi.bats is the current example and says so in its own header. The scan reads .bats files only, so a handler reaching a test body from a sourced .sh is outside it — hack/e2e-chainsaw/_lib/run-kubernetes.sh installs two, each benign for its own reason rather than by design: the one in cozy_capture_tenant_talos because that function is declared with ( and runs in a subshell, and the one in run_kubernetes_test because no @test calls it despite being declared with {. Seven hack/*.bats source that library. Treat the guard as a ratchet over a common spelling, not as proof that a file installs no handler. A handful of files still declare a debt while their conversion waits on the branches that own them; when one of those reports zero failures, reconcile its 1..N plan against its ok count before believing the run.

4. Do not mask cleanup or teardown failures

• Resources a test creates that Chainsaw cannot reclaim — because a controller, not the test, owns them (e.g. the Velero Backup, BackupStorageLocation, and credentials secret in cozy-velero in the disabled hack/e2e-chainsaw/backup/ suite) — must be pruned explicitly. Do not || true over a stuck delete and leave stale state for the next run.
• For nested tenants, tear down child → parent with a hard wait for deletion between each. Deleting the parent while a child is still uninstalling wedges the parent's cleanup Job on the child namespace, and both stuck uninstalls occupy helm-controller workers past the end of the test — starving whichever suite runs next. The kubernetes suites encode this ordering in hack/e2e-chainsaw/_lib/run-kubernetes.sh.

5. The install gate must have teeth

The install test fails if any HelmRelease is not Ready. A toothless gate (backgrounded kubectl wait discarding child exit codes + a bare echo instead of exit 1) once shipped a permanently-failing platform HR through green CI for weeks.

• Use a single kubectl wait hr --all -A, then an outcome-based re-list (covers HRs created after the snapshot), and exit 1 on any non-Ready HR.
• Dump the full Ready-condition message per non-Ready HR so the real error is in the test output. See hack/e2e-install-cozystack.bats.

6. Assert the parent HelmRelease did not remediate — via status.history

A parent HelmRelease that hit its wait timeout, uninstalled, and reinstalled is a silent race we want to catch. Do not check .status.installFailures / .status.upgradeFailures: Flux's ClearFailures() zeroes those on every successful reconcile, so checking them after the HR is Ready is vacuous and passes against a reverted fix.

• Inspect .status.history instead — a failed or uninstalled Snapshot survives a later successful reconcile. Use the shared helper in hack/e2e-chainsaw/_lib/remediation-guard.sh (helmrelease_has_remediation_cycle) from a script step.

7. Test-Impact Analysis (TIA), default-on

hack/select-e2e.sh walks the packages/core/platform/sources/*.yaml dependency graph and runs only the Chainsaw suites affected by a diff. A suite is a directory under hack/e2e-chainsaw/ containing a chainsaw-test.yaml.

• Conservative escalation: edits to packages/library/, packages/core/, the Go trees (api/, cmd/, internal/, pkg/), the codegen under tools/, go.mod/go.sum, top-level hack/*.sh|*.bats helpers and the hack/lib/ they source, hack/*.mk, hack/buildkitd.toml, hack/e2e-*.yaml, the shared hack/e2e-chainsaw/_lib/, the chainsaw config hack/e2e-chainsaw/.chainsaw.yaml, the Makefile, or any workflow that runs the suite escalate to the full suite. Only pull-requests.yaml is executed from the pull request's own head, so escalating on the other three buys generic regression coverage rather than coverage of the edit; the trade and its measured cost are written next to full_suite_pattern rather than repeated here. A per-suite edit (any file under hack/e2e-chainsaw/<app>/) selects only that suite, with one exception: a *.disabled file selects nothing, because a parked suite is executed by nothing and editing it cannot regress a test.
• Every path is classified, and an unclassified one escalates. The selector has three selection outcomes — full suite, a scoped set, or nothing — and each is reached by an explicit rule; the fourth outcome in the bullet below is not a selection but a refusal to produce one. Several rules produce the empty one, which is worth knowing before reading an empty selection as "the inert list matched": documentation, dashboards and *.md are dropped first wherever they live, a *.disabled Chainsaw suite and a examples/backups/<app>/ edit whose app has no suite are dropped where chainsaw and backup-example paths are matched, and inert_config_pattern covers repo meta, agent config and hack/testdata/. full_suite_pattern covers shared build inputs and the e2e harness, and the graph lookup handles packages/(apps|system|extra)/. A path matching none of them escalates to the full suite and logs why, because both lanes read an empty selection as "skip Chainsaw" and then post E2E Tests green — so a silent default is a green gate with nothing tested (#3392). When that escalation fires for something genuinely inert, add it to inert_config_pattern; do not relax the fall-through. The escalation list and the inert list are checked in that order, so a specific escalation beats a broad inert directory.
• Coverage is decided per changed path. A path that resolves through the graph but reaches no runnable suite is covered by nothing, so it forces the full run on its own account, whatever the rest of the diff selected. Reading that off the merged selection instead let any other changed path contributing a suite name swallow the escalation, with nothing in the output to record that it happened: change a platform component, adjust the Chainsaw test beside it, and the component's escalation disappeared behind that one suite (#3330). The unit is the path rather than the source, because one path can belong to several PackageSources — system/postgres-operator belongs to two, one of which reaches no suite — and deciding per source would escalate on that half and run everything for every change to it.
• There is a fourth outcome, and it is a failed step rather than a selection. It fires when the suite list itself is unavailable: find cannot list hack/e2e-chainsaw/, or that directory holds no chainsaw-test.yaml. There is no fallback left to take, because escalating would print an empty list and both lanes read an empty selection as "skip Chainsaw" before posting E2E Tests green — the outcome meaning "run everything" would deliver a run of nothing. So the selector names what broke on stderr and exits non-zero; both lanes run the step under bash -e, so the job fails and the required check goes red. A red Select E2E tests step is a real signal, not a flake: read its stderr line before rerunning. A yq failure is deliberately not in this class — what is missing there is the dependency graph, not the suite list, so the selector still has a safe answer and escalates to the full suite. That is conservative but quiet: the only sign is one stderr line inside a step that passes, so a selector running blind on every PR looks exactly like a project that escalates a lot.
• The one path the fall-through cannot catch is a new e2e workflow. inert_config_pattern makes .github/ inert as a directory, and the workflows that run the suite are exempted from it by name in full_suite_pattern. A workflow added under .github/workflows/ therefore reads as inert until someone adds it to that enumeration, and the fall-through never sees it. That is why the list carries a rg -l test-chainsaw .github/workflows/ reminder: the enumeration is the guard, not a convenience.
• The full-e2e PR label forces the whole suite.
• The selection is passed to make test-chainsaw CHAINSAW_SUITES="<names>", which runs chainsaw test <names> from hack/e2e-chainsaw/ (empty = the whole suite).
• The coverage gap TIA opens on PRs is closed at release-cut time: the "Prepare release" commit bakes image digests into packages/core/ (and other packages), which TIA escalates to the full suite — so the release PR exercises the whole suite against the commit the tag will point at.

When adding a new app package, confirm select-e2e.sh maps it correctly (it has a unit test, hack/select-e2e_test.bats). A new app whose suite directory does not yet exist will not be selected — add hack/e2e-chainsaw/<app>/chainsaw-test.yaml first.

src_to_suites() maps a PackageSource name to the suites it owns and is the inverse of select-install.sh's suite_to_source(). A test walks every suite through both tables, so a source whose name fits neither convention — not <suite>-application, not the suite name itself — fails there rather than quietly making its own suite unreachable, which turns every change to that package into a full run (#3665).

What TIA does and does not do

Be precise about TIA's scope — it is narrower than "skip E2E for unrelated PRs," and the wiring has consequences worth knowing before you rely on it or change it.

• It trims only which suites chainsaw test runs, not the expensive stages. Prepare environment and Install Cozystack (the full platform install) run regardless of the selection. TIA only decides the CHAINSAW_SUITES passed to the final E2E step. A perfect narrow saves the suite tail, not the bulk of wall-time. (Package image builds are scoped separately — by hack/build-matrix.sh, on the PR diff — while the Talos and installer/finalize legs still run for non-docs PRs; that is a distinct mechanism from TIA's suite trimming.)
• Select E2E tests runs after Install Cozystack and has no always(). GitHub implicitly ANDs a step's if: with success(), so if install fails the selector (and Run E2E tests) are skipped entirely. On a red install you will not see TIA narrow anything — that is the ordering, not a selector bug.
• Most PRs legitimately escalate to the full suite. Platform manifests live under packages/core/, Go under api//internal/, helpers under hack/, plus the Makefile — touching any one triggers the full suite. So "all suites selected" is usually correct, not a failure to narrow.
• Two skip layers, with a gap. The plan job computes a coarse docs-only gate (code, true for any change outside docs/**) that skips the whole build+E2E pipeline for docs-only PRs, plus a per-package build matrix (hack/build-matrix.sh) that scopes which images build. TIA's finer skip (select-e2e.sh ignoring docs/, dashboards/, *.md and the rest of inert_config_pattern) only trims the suite selection. A PR touching only dashboards/*.json therefore still runs install, then skips just the Chainsaw suites — near-zero savings. If you need such PRs to skip the pipeline, widen the plan docs-gate, not select-e2e.sh.

8. Failure must be self-explanatory — diagnostics are first-class

• On install failure, the CI step dumps kubectl get hr -A -o wide, a describe of each non-Ready HR, and sorted events, all under collapsible ::group:: blocks.
• On E2E failure, the CI step dumps kubectl get hr -A, sorted events, and COSI bucket/claim/access readiness columns (those CRDs ship no printer columns, so plain get shows only NAME/AGE). The chainsaw test run is one step, so this dump is at run level; Chainsaw's own per-Test catch blocks add scoped events/describe/podLogs for the failing suite.
• Inside a suite, attach scoped diagnostics with a top-level catch: block (events, describe, podLogs, get) rather than letting a bare assert failure through — see hack/e2e-chainsaw/bucket/chainsaw-test.yaml and hack/e2e-chainsaw/harbor/chainsaw-test.yaml. This replaces the BATS ... || { echo …; kubectl get/describe …; false; } idiom.
• make collect-report → hack/cozyreport.sh uploads a full cozyreport.tgz (operator/Flux/cert-manager logs, LINSTOR, Kamaji, Talos dmesg, COSI YAML) on every run, and the Chainsaw JUnit report (chainsaw-report.xml) is uploaded as its own artifact.
• The report's per-pod evidence, under kubernetes/pods/ in cozyreport.tgz, is selected by the READY column rather than by STATUS — so a pod left at 0/1 Running by a readiness probe that never passes is in scope, where before it was not. In scope is not the same as collected: the walk stops at COZY_REPORT_PODS_MAX pods or COZY_REPORT_PODS_BUDGET seconds, and what it did not reach is named in the artifact rather than dropped in silence, as the next point describes. Selecting on the STATUS column alone drops exactly that pod, and it is a common way for a suite to time out: the replica never joins, its HelmRelease sits in InProgress, and the artifact carries no trace of the pod the run died on. Terminal Succeeded/Completed pods stay excluded, since they legitimately end unready. Widening the selection and capping the walk are only safe together if the widening cannot displace what the uncapped walk always kept, so the collection order splits by evidence class before namespace: every pod that is not Running — a crash loop, Pending, Error, the class the collector took before this — is ordered ahead of every pod that is Running but unready, and COZY_REPORT_PREFER_NS orders within each of those two classes rather than across the whole selection. Otherwise a failed install with more not-Ready pods than the cap spends it on newly-in-scope tenant pods and drops the container logs of the platform pod that is actually crashing.
• Every bound that the report's pod collection hits is named in the artifact, not only in the job log. The pod walk stops at COZY_REPORT_PODS_MAX pods or COZY_REPORT_PODS_BUDGET seconds and leaves COLLECTION-TRUNCATED.txt naming whichever fired; a pod it cut off part way through leaves CONTAINER-LOGS-TRUNCATED.txt; a pod list that never came back leaves COLLECTION-FAILED.txt rather than the empty tree a healthy cluster produces; a missing local timeout leaves COLLECTION-UNBOUNDED.txt, because the reads still run, just without a ceiling, and a missing dependency on the machine writing the report is not a statement about the cluster; a kind this cluster does not serve at all — kubectl get vm -A on an install without KubeVirt, which exits non-zero — leaves KIND-NOT-SERVED.txt rather than a failure marker, since that is the cluster answering correctly and a marker that fires on healthy installs is one a reader learns to skip; and a knob value the collector could not use is named too, appended to COLLECTION-TRUNCATED.txt when there is one, written to COLLECTION-NOTES.txt when there is not, and appended to COLLECTION-FAILED.txt instead when the pod list itself never returned, so the note always sits beside the failure it accompanies rather than in a file the reader has no reason to open, and a bound that turns out to be the default is not mistaken for the bound that was asked for. A pod whose container list came back as a prefix — kubectl named some containers and then failed — leaves CONTAINER-LIST-INCOMPLETE.txt beside the logs it did manage to read, because the containers it never named have no file at all and their absence would otherwise read as containers that were silent. A read that succeeded while kubectl also wrote to stderr — a deprecation notice, a partial-result warning — leaves that message in READ-WARNINGS.txt beside the object rather than inside it, since pod.yaml and the logs are machine-read and a warning line in them costs the parser the file, while dropping it altogether would be the silent loss of evidence this tree exists to prevent. A pod directory whose containers produced any log at all also carries CONTAINER-LOGS-BOUND.txt, naming the --tail bound those logs were written under (a pod whose every container was silent has no bounded log to describe, so the file is absent), because --tail drops the oldest lines and nothing in a log says so; it sits beside the logs rather than inside them, since a log read in full is a complete artifact and the platform's controllers log JSON per line, so a trailing prose line would break every parser that could read the file before. A pod whose container list could not be read leaves logs-UNAVAILABLE.txt in its own directory, carrying kubectl's reason, because a pod directory holding pod.yaml and describe.txt and no logs at all otherwise reads as a pod whose containers were silent. The VM, VMI and services loops carry the same pair of bounds as constants rather than knobs, so a failed install that leaves every LoadBalancer without an address collects the first of them and names the rest instead of running the report step past its own timeout-minutes: 30, which would lose the tarball rather than truncate it, since the collector writes it on its last line. That step ceiling is the outer backstop for a read with no bound of its own; it does not save this report, it saves the steps after it, the other uploads included. It carries continue-on-error: true alongside, because the step's || true is its standing statement that collecting diagnostics is never fatal and a step killed at its ceiling never reaches that || true — without it a passing run whose collection ran long would be published as a failed one, and every later failure() in the job would start meaning "the tests failed or the report was slow". That tolerance also hides the overrun, since the step then renders green, so a following step turns the collect step's outcome into a ::warning:: annotation — a bound that fires is recorded, and the outer bound is not exempt from the rule the inner ones follow. The LINSTOR reads that run a command inside a pod carry a ceiling too — they are the only reads whose duration a workload sets rather than the apiserver, and a wedged controller holds the stream open with nothing on either end to close it — and they record a cutoff in COLLECTION-FAILED.txt beside their output, which for the two that stream a gzipped tarball is the only place it can go, since a line of prose inside one is an archive nothing opens; the four that produce a table carry the marker in the file as well. A LINSTOR table that got nothing at all — the wedged controller killed before it wrote a byte — says so in the file rather than shipping at zero length, and a read whose stderr could not be captured says that too instead of reporting silence. A LINSTOR table cut short carries the marker inside itself whether the clock or the command ended it, in the same # [cozyreport] form every other in-file marker uses so one anchored grep finds them all, and the note about a satellite pod list that came back short lands under linstor/error-reports/ beside the bundles rather than in the shared Kubernetes file, like every other .txt in the tarball, because a short node list whose explanation sits one directory up reads as a small cluster; the two archives cannot take one, since a line of prose inside a gzip stream is a file nothing opens. A cut-off bundle goes one of two ways and the note names both: a stream that got members across is kept and truncated, so a short member list there is the cutoff rather than a satellite with few reports, while a stream killed before its first byte leaves zero bytes and the emptiness check at the call site removes it. The reader runs before that check, so it says which two outcomes are possible instead of asserting one. The four LINSTOR reads whose output is a table keep the remote command's whole message in the file itself when the command produced no table of its own — a partial table plus an error keeps the message beside the file instead, so the table stays a table — because kubectl exec appends its own command terminated with exit code N last — so the last line there is the one line that never carries the cause, and a listing sent away from its own error is a zero-byte file saying nothing. That note states what the status leaves open instead of resolving it: kubectl exec returns the remote command's own exit status, so a 124 there is either the collector's deadline firing or the command itself exiting 124, and nothing separates the two. Every other read in the collector carries a ceiling too, gates included — an if kubectl get deploy … that decides whether a module runs is a read, and an unbounded one ends the whole report before the module it guards. A gate cut off short is recorded rather than treated as an answer, because skipping the module produces the same empty tree as a cluster that never had the component; a gate that answers "not installed" is recorded nowhere, since that is the cluster answering correctly and a marker firing on every install without KubeVirt is one a reader learns to skip. What a per-read ceiling does not give you is a ceiling on the report: the pod, VM, VMI and services walks carry a count cap and a time budget, and every other per-object walk in the collector carries neither, so their cost is the cluster's to set and a failed install with a hundred not-Ready HelmReleases spends four hundred bounded reads there, four per release. Described as "the walks outside those four" rather than listed by name, because a list of them drifts and reads as complete while it does so — which is the defect this same change removed from the collector's own header. The step's timeout-minutes is what bounds that, not the per-read wrapper. Whichever bound stopped a walk says so in COLLECTION-TRUNCATED.txt, count and clock alike, because objects removed by the clock while the count note stood alone would read as a cap that never fired. The read that feeds each loop is bounded too: the budget cannot start until rows arrive, so an apiserver hanging on the cluster-wide list would otherwise spend the whole collection step with the deadline never consulted. The budget is a deadline for starting a read rather than for finishing the walk, and it is rechecked between containers but not between a container's current and previous log, so the ceiling is the budget plus one pod's object reads plus both log reads of one container, which is the price of never leaving a half-written file behind.
• COZY_REPORT_POD_TAIL bounds each container log at 2000 lines by default, and a log that was read successfully records which bound it was written under, since --tail drops the oldest lines and a file that begins mid-stream looks exactly like a complete one; -1 restores kubectl's own default of the whole log. COZY_REPORT_PREFER_NS (default tenant-) is collected first, so a cap that only bites on a broadly degraded cluster is not spent on platform namespaces while the pod the suite died on falls off the end.
• Capture the PREVIOUS container instance, not just the current one. For a crash-looping pod kubectl logs (and the Chainsaw podLogs collector, which in v0.2.15 has no previous option — it does accept name/namespace/selector/container/tail/timeout/cluster/clusters) shows the Nth restart — a fresh replay of the same startup path — while the evidence that explains the failure sits in the immediately preceding instance, reachable only via --previous and lost for good once the kubelet garbage-collects that container. hack/e2e-capture-previous-logs.sh closes this once for every suite from the global error.catch (and from hack/cozytest.sh for the e2e BATS suites) rather than per-suite: it discovers containers with restartCount > 0 at runtime — init containers included, since an interrupted bootstrap lives there — orders the app suites' tenant-test namespace first (a best-effort ordering only — it never restricts the capture, and for a suite whose pods live in a child tenant namespace it simply degrades to input order), and dumps each to the job log and to snapshots/<test>/previous-logs/. Containers that never restarted are skipped, so a healthy run emits one line, not a page of "previous terminated container not found". Every way the capture can come up short is named rather than inferred: the COZY_PREVLOG_MAX overflow, a malformed cap, a COZY_PREVLOG_TAIL that was rejected and fell back to 200 (a zero or leading-zero tail asks kubectl for nothing, which would otherwise be reported as the container having logged nothing), the tail bound each kept log was written under — named in capture-notes.txt beside the logs rather than inside them, since --tail drops the oldest lines and nothing in the output says so while a log read in full is a complete artifact that a trailing prose line would stop any parser from reading, and suppressed on -1 because no bound was applied then — a pod list that never returned (which is NOT the same as "nothing restarted" and must not be reported as such), a read that timed out versus one kubectl itself refused (kubelet GC, RBAC, an unreachable node — different problems that a blanket "kubelet GC" line would hide), a previous instance that produced no output, and a capture the outer backstop cut short. A partial log is kept and marked truncated, never deleted — it is the only copy of something already gone from the cluster. Each of those lines the script itself emits is written to snapshots/<test>/previous-logs/capture-notes.txt as well as to the job log, and the directory is created before the first of them, so a reader who has only the uploaded artifact can still tell a capture that found nothing from one that never ran. The outer backstop firing is the exception: that line comes from the callers, after the script has already been killed, and reaches the job log only. hack/cozytest.sh arms this capture, and the other two legs, only for suites whose own filename or whose parent directory carries the e2e- prefix, because all three read cluster state and a unit runner has kubectl on PATH with no cluster behind it, so a red unit test used to walk into the kubectl-gated legs on its way out, and into the crust-gather one as well on any machine where that binary happened to be installed.
• The data-plane collector is the third capture leg, and the only one that reads forwarding state off the node. hack/e2e-capture-dataplane.sh runs after the crust-gather snapshot, from hack/cozytest.sh for the e2e BATS suites and from the global error.catch in hack/e2e-chainsaw/.chainsaw.yaml for the Chainsaw ones, and it collects what an object-state snapshot structurally cannot: the cilium endpoint and BPF conntrack view from an affected pod's node, the kernel conntrack table that is the authoritative one for the host-to-local-pod path under enable-host-legacy-routing, and the LoadBalancer datapath. Its two callers bound it differently, 600s from cozytest.sh and 300s from the Chainsaw catch, so anything added to what it collects has to fit the smaller of the two rather than the one you happened to test under. It holds the same notes contract as the previous-logs collector, with one stated exception: every read carries its own ceiling, and why a read produced nothing goes to capture-notes.txt beside the capture rather than only to the job log, because an empty result and a read that never answered are the same bytes on disk and only the note tells them apart; the two EndpointSlice reads in the LoadBalancer path are the exception and report nothing either way, so a <none> backend line there does not distinguish an endpointless Service from a read that never answered.
• A catch script needs an explicit timeout: that exceeds the inner budgets it contains. A Chainsaw script op is bounded by timeouts.exec (5m in .chainsaw.yaml) unless it overrides it, so a catch whose own timeout -k … wrappers sum past that is structurally guaranteed to be killed — it reports SCRIPT | ERROR | signal: killed and yields nothing. That kill is strictly worse than an inner timeout firing: SIGKILL takes out the process group, so the collector dies mid-write and every later step in the script is skipped, whereas an inner timeout exits 124, leaves a partial capture on disk, and lets the rest of the catch run. Size the op timeout above the sum of the inner budgets and let the inner ones be what fires.
• When the sum cannot fit the op, bound the collection phase as a phase rather than raising the op. The rule above assumes the inner budgets add up to something an op timeout can sit above. On a failure path that has accumulated collectors it stops being true — the tenant-Kubernetes node-join path in hack/e2e-chainsaw/_lib/run-kubernetes.sh sums past what is left of its 50m op once the bringup ahead of it and the snapshot behind it are counted, and several of its reads carry only --request-timeout, which bounds one HTTP request rather than a client retrying against a wedged apiserver, so parts of it have no ceiling to add up in the first place. Raising the op ceiling does not fix that shape, it postpones it: a larger ceiling multiplied by a sum that grows with every collector added is the same problem one collector later. What works instead is a wall-clock budget for the whole phase (COZY_DIAG_PHASE_BUDGET, with cozy_diag_phase_start / cozy_diag_phase_has_time): once it is spent, the collectors that have not started are declined out loud instead of attempted, so whatever must run after the phase — the tenant crust-gather snapshot, in that case — is never queued behind work begun past the deadline. Two consequences worth carrying to the next collector. The budget bounds when a collector may start, not when the phase ends, so it is not a worst case and the comment next to it must not be written as one. And because what runs last is what gets declined, source order becomes load-bearing: put the cheap reads that discriminate between failure modes ahead of the collectors that cost minutes, or the budget will spend itself on the expensive ones and drop the evidence the path exists to produce.
• Set crust-gather --duration explicitly. It is crust-gather's own budget for the collection phase and it defaults to 60s; on elapse it abandons the collection and skips its finish step, leaving a partial tree with nothing to say the rest is missing. The outer wall-clock must exceed it, because the API discovery crust-gather runs first is not covered by that budget at all — with an unhealthy aggregated APIService (the state a failed e2e is usually in) aggregated discovery times out and the fallback re-walks every group, which can consume the entire outer timeout before a single object is written. Do not diagnose a killed snapshot by bumping the outer number alone; the two budgets bound different phases. Send the collector's output to a log inside the snapshot rather than /dev/null so "complete or truncated?" is answerable from the artifact.
• Per-failed-test crust-gather snapshots are the richest diagnostic — a crust-gather serve-able archive of the cluster at the moment of failure, before cleanup. The global error.catch in hack/e2e-chainsaw/.chainsaw.yaml captures the host cluster into _out/cozyreport/snapshots/<test>/host on any failure (the Chainsaw analog of the hack/cozytest.sh EXIT-trap snapshot used by the e2e BATS suites); the kubernetes suites additionally snapshot their tenant cluster from hack/e2e-chainsaw/_lib/run-kubernetes.sh while the tenant API LB is still routable. hack/cozyreport.sh folds snapshots/ into the artifact. Do not remove the global catch — without it the Chainsaw suite uploads a report with no per-test cluster state.

9. Keep the test environment deterministic

• Pre-pull every kubeovn / linstor / cert-manager image onto all nodes before those HelmReleases install (hack/e2e-prepull-images.sh), so clustered workloads (OVN raft, LINSTOR, the cert-manager webhook) do not fail on per-node image-pull stagger.
• Exclude loop devices from host LVM scanning in the Talos machine config so the host does not activate volume groups inside loop-mounted e2e disk images.
• Fail fast on node readiness (≈5m, then bail) rather than marching into LB/NFS tests that will also fail — it saves several minutes per attempt and keeps the real failure at the top of the log.
• Give the sandbox a runner class strictly larger than its guests. hack/e2e-prepare-cluster.bats boots the management nodes with fixed -smp and -m, and those resources are committed for the whole run, so a lane whose runner only just covers them leaves the host nothing for QEMU's own threads, containerd and the runner agent. A new e2e lane picks its runs-on accordingly; hack/sandbox-runner-headroom.bats derives both sides and fails the unit suite when any lane loses that margin.

10. The E2E workflow split: same-repo vs fork, and the "E2E Tests" commit status

A fork's pull_request run carries no registry credentials, so it cannot push the images the e2e sandbox pulls. E2E therefore runs across two workflows:

• .github/workflows/pull-requests.yaml runs e2e in-tree for same-repo PRs (the e2e job, named E2E (in-tree)). Fork PRs skip this job.
• .github/workflows/e2e-fork.yaml runs e2e for fork PRs via a privileged workflow_run that fires after the fork's Pull Request run completes. It pushes the fork-built images to the registry and runs the suite — the same Chainsaw + TIA path as in-tree (§7) — in an ephemeral sandbox that itself has no push credentials.

Consequences to keep in mind when touching either workflow:

• Fork builds export, they do not push (OCI_EXPORT_DIR). The fork's unprivileged build sets OCI_EXPORT_DIR (see hack/common-envs.mk) so every image is written to a per-image OCI archive artifact instead of being pushed; the privileged e2e-fork.yaml later pushes those archives to the registry by digest. Any build recipe that shells out to push directly — e.g. a skopeo copy … docker://… that bypasses the image-tags/oci-output macros — must honour OCI_EXPORT_DIR too, or a fork build dies with an anonymous-push denied (#3257). This is covered by hack/common-envs_test.bats.

• "E2E Tests" is a commit status — not a job, and not a check-run. The required merge-gate context named E2E Tests is a GitHub commit status, posted by the plan/e2e-report pair for same-repo PRs and by e2e-fork.yaml's resolve/report pair for forks — not the e2e job itself. Each lane opens the context with pending and concludes it when the suite is done, and the opener is not optional: a commit status never expires, so a head SHA that already went green would otherwise keep reading green from the moment a re-run, a reopen or a full-e2e label starts a new run until that run reports, leaving the pull request mergeable across a suite that may be about to fail. While the gate was a job, a fresh non-success check run appeared automatically and closed that window. The two lanes close it at different speeds, and the fork lane does not close it entirely. Same-repo, the opener is plan's first step, so the window lasts seconds. On a fork the opener is resolve, which cannot run until the unprivileged build has finished, so re-running an already-green fork head leaves the old green readable for the length of that build. The gap is structural rather than an oversight: a fork's pull_request token is read-only and cannot write a status at all, which is the same property the rest of this design relies on. It is bounded by the build and it is the one case where "the opener closes the window" is not literally true. Two reasons it is a status:

  • Not a job: a required job that is skipped (as the e2e job is for forks) counts as passed by branch protection — exactly how fork PRs used to merge with e2e never run (#3257). A status is success only when the report step posts it; a never-posted required status stays "Expected" and blocks the merge. If you rename the e2e job, do not name it E2E Tests and do not wire branch protection to a job name — the status must stay the gate.
  • Not a check-run: a check-run created with the default GITHUB_TOKEN floats into an arbitrary GitHub Actions check-suite (in practice the earliest-registered one, a tiny labeler — that is why E2E Tests once rendered under "PR size label"), and an app-token check-run would need the COZYSTACK_CI app granted checks: write. A commit status has neither problem: branch protection matches it by context name and it carries no check-suite grouping. It is safe to post with the default token because a fork's pull_request token is read-only and cannot post a status — so only same-repo runs (plan's opener and e2e-report, both guarded !fork) and the privileged workflow_run in e2e-fork.yaml can set it. Each publishing job carries permissions: statuses: write and calls repos.createCommitStatus. plan's opener is additionally continue-on-error, since every build and test job hangs off plan and a transient status-API failure there must not discard the run; losing it only restores the stale-green window for that one run. Consequence for branch protection: require the E2E Tests status context (no GitHub App and no app-id pin needed).

• Fork TIA reads trusted inputs, but the fork still writes the selector. e2e-fork.yaml's e2e job runs the same select-e2e.sh TIA as in-tree (§7), and its inputs are hardened: the changed-file list and the full-e2e label come from resolve's base-repo API lookups (pulls.listFiles / the PR's labels), the same trusted source as the docs-only decision, passed in as outputs (changed_b64, full_e2e) rather than re-derived from a git diff of the fork-controlled merge ref. Keep that part as it is: re-deriving the selection from the checked-out tree would add a second bypass for no gain.

• What the fork lane is, and is not. The e2e job runs from the fork's tree, so select-e2e.sh, the suites under hack/e2e-chainsaw/, hack/e2e-install-cozystack.bats and packages/core/testing's recipes are all fork-authored. A fork that wants its own suite to report green can edit any of them, and hardening the TIA inputs does not change that. Read the lane accordingly: it is a correctness gate that stops an honest contributor shipping a regression, not a boundary against a hostile one. What contains a hostile fork is that no fork run executes without maintainer approval (below), that the job holds no push credential, and that a diff editing the test harness is visible in review.

• A fork PR that adds a new image cannot go green until that image exists on the base branch. publish derives the set of archive names it will accept from the base parent (HEAD^1), so that a fork cannot mint arbitrary repositories under the CI registry by naming an artifact. An image the PR itself introduces is therefore not in that set, and the job fails with image '<name>' is not in the base-tree allowlist. This is fail-closed by design and there is no label override — land the image on the base branch first, or run the suite from a same-repo branch. If a fork e2e run fails on that line, the contribution is not broken; the allowlist is doing its job.

• labeled events run in their own concurrency group, and a cancelled run reports nothing. Because the gate is a status rather than a job, a run that dies without posting leaves the head SHA at "Expected" — which blocks the merge rather than passing it. Several separate pieces implement it, and weakening any one of them reopens the gap. Each lane's terminal reporter runs under !cancelled() rather than always(), so a run that was cancelled publishes nothing at all and the pending it opened stands until the run that superseded it reports. Each lane's concurrency key then keeps a run that is going to publish nothing out of the group of the run that is: pull-requests.yaml's appends -label for a labeled event that plan discards, so labelling an open PR cannot cancel a live opened/synchronize run (the replacement run would never post the status the cancelled run was going to) — the condition is the complement of plan's guard, so a full-e2e label, which does publish, stays in the main group and supersedes the head run instead of racing it, e2e-fork.yaml's concurrency key appends the triggering run's id when that run concluded cancelled or skipped so a privileged run that is going to post nothing cannot cancel the one that is going to post, and e2e-fork.yaml's resolve returns early on a cancelled/skipped triggering run instead of posting failure for it. If you touch any of them, keep the invariant: exactly one run per head SHA is responsible for the status, and a run that is not that one must post nothing at all.

Security prerequisite (repo setting). The split is only safe if fork runs require maintainer approval before they execute. The repository must keep Settings → Actions → "Require approval for all outside collaborators" enabled, so a fork's pull_request run — which produces the artifacts e2e-fork.yaml consumes — cannot run untrusted code (or feed the privileged run) without a maintainer's go-ahead.

Chainsaw v0.2.15 gotchas

The suite is pinned to Chainsaw v0.2.15 (the latest release as of May 2026); none of the traps below are fixed upstream yet, so the workarounds stay until a bump is possible. Each one has already cost a debugging session — this is the "no one gets it right the first time" list, worth a read before writing a new assert.

• Condition asserts must use the filter-as-list form. (conditions[?type == 'Ready']) evaluates to a list; assert against it with a list body (- status: "True"). The indexed (conditions[?type == 'Ready'])[0] form throws field not found (also enforced by convention 2).
• No number literals / backticks in JMESPath. ports[?port == `443`] mis-evaluates in v0.2.15 — the numeric comparison silently returns the wrong set. Assert ports (and any numeric field) with the exact-ordered projection form instead: (ports[*].port): [80, 443]. sort() and contains(list, <number>) are likewise broken with numeric arguments.
• error: fails hard on an unknown GVK. Unlike the BATS ! kubectl get <kind> idiom (which passes when the type is absent), a Chainsaw error: op against a kind whose CRD is not installed errors the step rather than asserting absence. If a type may legitimately not exist (a version rename, an optional component), gate the check behind a positive precondition or do it in a script step — never a bare error:. This is what broke the etcd suite on the v1alpha1 → v1alpha2 rename.
• No conditional Test-level skip. There is no skip: <expr>; an env-var-gated test must exit 0 early inside a script step (see the ETCD_E2E_S3_ROUNDTRIP gate). A Test with no matching gate always runs.
• finally is step-level, not test-level. To guarantee teardown of something Chainsaw did not create, put the work and its own cleanup in a single script step; there is no test-wide finally block to hang it on.
• Cleanup is bounded and blocking — it surfaces latent teardown bugs. Chainsaw waits for the resources it applied to actually delete (within the delete/cleanup timeouts in hack/e2e-chainsaw/.chainsaw.yaml) and fails the test if they don't. This is deliberate — a stuck uninstall starves the next suite — but it means a teardown path the BATS suite masked with || true now surfaces as context deadline exceeded at cleanup. The failure is honest, not new; fix the teardown rather than widening the timeout (see cozystack/cozystack#3271, a pre-delete hook that hung on a nodeless tenant).
• Reading a failure diff: the "actual" side is a projection. Chainsaw projects the live object onto the expected fields, so status: {} in a diff means "the expression matched nothing / evaluated empty," not "status is literally empty." The real reason is the error line above the diff — read that first.
• A catch/cleanup script's cwd is the failing suite's directory (hack/e2e-chainsaw/<suite>/), so ../../.. is the repo root. The suites cd ../../.. and then source shared helpers by repo-root-relative path (hack/e2e-chainsaw/_lib/…) rather than juggling ../ hops.

Reviewer checklist for a new or changed E2E test

1. No new retry loop unless the step is pure infra (image pull / VM boot / network).
2. Resource readiness uses a Chainsaw assert (not an imperative until kubectl get …; kubectl wait); condition checks use the filter-as-list form (conditions[?type == 'Ready']).
3. Imperative-only waits live in a script step; any bare sleep carries a TODO(e2e-replace-fixed-timeouts): justification, unless it is a measurement interval, which §2 carves out by name and which takes no marker because no event can replace it.
4. No test-level EXIT/RETURN trap — rely on Chainsaw cleanup; a self-contained trap is allowed inside a single script step (port-forward / temp dir), and inside an explicit subshell within a BATS @test, where it does not displace the runner's own handler. A BATS file that still carries test-level traps declares the count itself in # EXIT-TRAP DEBT: N; do not ask for one to be removed without checking that line, because the count is exact in both directions.
5. Controller-created artifacts the test cannot reclaim are pruned explicitly; nested tenants delete child → parent with a wait-for-deletion between.
6. Standard HR-Ready assert timeout is 5–6m; longer waits (harbor 10m, NFS 10m, VM image pulls, platform-wide install 15m) are justified in-line.
7. Failure path attaches scoped diagnostics via a catch: block, never a silent pass.
8. If it touches parent-HR behavior, add the status.history remediation guard (hack/e2e-chainsaw/_lib/remediation-guard.sh).

In-flight direction (not yet the merged standard)

These are being explored on branches and may become conventions; do not assume they are the current main behavior:

• Cilium orphaned-endpoint self-heal — an interim CI watchdog that evicts a single confirmed-orphan Cilium endpoint ("IP already in use", cilium/cilium#38313). Explicitly a mitigation to remove once a fixed Cilium ships; it refuses to touch an endpoint backing a live pod so real duplicate-IP bugs stay visible.
• Cluster state snapshot/restore between test groups instead of reinstalling.