dstest

Deterministic Simulation Testing for containerised services.

Write Lua scripts to define, control, and verify chaos experiments on Docker containers with reproducible fault injection.

Workload generation, walkable fault trees and benefit of the LuaJIT std lib.

Installation

From crates.io:

cargo install dstest

# Run a script file
dstest < examples/oracle.lua

# Or use REPL mode: type your script interactively, press Ctrl+D to execute
dstest

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/bxrne/dstest
cd dstest
cargo build --release

Quick Start

# Run a script file
cat examples/oracle.lua | cargo run

# Or use REPL mode: type your script and press Ctrl+D to run it
cargo run

Overview

dstest lets you write Lua scripts that define test subjects (Docker containers), inject faults (pause, kill, resource deprivation, proxied network impairments), and verify service resilience: including virtual clocks for time-dependent logic, seeded workload randomness, depends for multi-service startup ordering, and sustained workload generation from OpenAPI specs.

Important

Deterministic Execution & Workloads While fault selection and schedule generation are seed-deterministic, standard container execution under default runtimes (runc) is subject to OS process/thread scheduling variance and wall-clock timing jitter. To make container execution and workload timing fully deterministic across runs, subjects must be configured with the dtrun OCI runtime:

local s = dstest.setup(cfg, {
    image = "my-service:latest",
    runtime = "dtrun", -- Enables deterministic execution via dtrun
    ports = { 8080 },
})

Examples

• openapi.lua - Drive sustained HTTP workload from an OpenAPI spec file
• oracle.lua - Fault injection with oracle predicates and invariants
• link.lua - Proxied network faults: latency, loss, partitions between subjects
• partition.lua - Directional link partitions and latency/loss measured through a proxy
• clock.lua - Virtual clock control: freeze, advance, offset (manual clock)
• tcp.lua - Raw TCP protocol exchange over dstest.net.tcp
• storage.lua - Virtual disk faults: corrupt, snapshot, restore, I/O errors
• orchestrate.lua - Full fault-schedule orchestration with run_steps and oracles
• pg.lua - PostgreSQL: connect, create table, insert, query, close

Documentation

See DOCS.md for the full Lua API reference.

AI Assistant Support

This repo includes an AI skill (SKILL.md) that teaches assistants how to work with dstest.

To use with your agent:

# Claude Code / Opencode
cp SKILL.md ~/.config/opencode/skills/dstest/SKILL.md

# Other agents (e.g., ~/.agents/skills/)
mkdir -p ~/.agents/skills/dstest
cp SKILL.md ~/.agents/skills/dstest/SKILL.md

Then instruct your assistant to "use the dstest skill" when writing or debugging chaos experiments.

Environment-limited examples

Four examples need a real Linux Docker environment that a macOS + podman-machine host cannot provide:

Example	Why it fails on podman-machine (macOS)
httpbin.lua	The link proxy's bridge IP (10.88.x.x) is unreachable from the host process
link.lua	Same bridge-reachability requirement
partition.lua	Same bridge-reachability requirement
storage.lua	Needs root + device-mapper (losetup, dmsetup, mkfs.ext4, mount) and the dm-flakey kernel module

The harness host process must be able to dial the Docker bridge IP that the link proxy binds; from inside the macOS podman-machine VM the sandbox bridge is not routable, and the VM kernel does not expose dm-flakey. These are environment limitations, not example bugs.

These four examples are not exercised by the automated checks on this host and no in-repo workaround exists: running them requires a real Linux Docker host where the bridge IP is reachable from the dstest process and root/device-mapper with dm-flakey is available. They are documented for completeness and are expected to fail here.

Requirements

• A Docker-compatible daemon reachable over DOCKER_HOST (Docker or Podman with DOCKER_HOST pointed at the Podman socket; docker may be aliased to podman)
• Rust 1.85+ (uses 2024 edition)
• Zig: build.rs cross-compiles the virtual-clock shim (shim/clock.c) to a Linux x86-64 ELF pinned to the glibc 2.17 baseline with zig cc, so it loads into any glibc-based subject. Zig is required on every build platform, including Linux and CI. Install via nix profile install nixpkgs#zig or your package manager.

License

MIT