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.

Felix itself, along with most of Calico, is licensed under the Apache v2.0 license. The BPF programs in the bpf-gpl directory are licensed under the GPL v2.0 for compatibility with Linux kernel helper functions.

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

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.

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.

Felix mostly uses Docker for builds. We develop on Ubuntu 16.04 but other Linux distributions should work (there are known Makefile issues 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 build

or, the calico/felix docker image:

make image

When you run make build or make image, it creates the felix binary or docker image for linux on your architecture. The outputs are as follows:

• Binary: bin/calico-felix-${ARCH}, e.g. bin/calico-felix-amd64 or bin/calico-felix-arm64
• Image: calico/felix:${TAG}-${ARCH}, e.g. calico/felix:3.0.0-amd64 or calico/felix:latest-ppc64le

When you are running on amd64, you can build the binaries and images for other platforms by setting the ARCH variable. For example:

$ make build ARCH=arm64 # OR
$ make image ARCH=ppc64le

If you wish to make all of the binaries or images, use the standard calico project targets build-all and image-all:

$ make build-all # OR
$ make image-all

Note that the image and image-all targets have the build targets as a dependency.

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

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 >=1.10

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.

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.

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.