Pongo provides a simple way of testing Kong plugins. For a complete walkthrough check this blogpost on the Kong website.

                /~\
  ______       C oo
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  | | | (_) | | | | (_| | (_) |
  \_|  \___/|_| |_|\__, |\___/
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                   |___/  v2.14.0

Usage: pongo action [options...] [--] [action options...]

Options (can also be added to '.pongo/pongorc'):
  --no-postgres      do not start postgres db
  --cassandra        do start cassandra db
  --grpcbin          do start grpcbin (see readme for info)
  --redis            do start redis db (see readme for info)
  --squid            do start squid forward-proxy (see readme for info)

Project actions:
  init          initializes the current plugin directory with some default
                configuration files if not already there (not required)

  lint          will run the LuaCheck linter

  pack          will pack all '*.rockspec' files into '*.rock' files for
                distribution (see LuaRocks package manager docs)

  run           run spec files, accepts Busted options and spec files/folders
                as arguments, see: 'pongo run -- --help'

  shell         get a shell directly on a kong container

  tail          starts a tail on the specified file. Default file is
                ./servroot/logs/error.log, an alternate file can be specified

Environment actions:
  build         build the Kong test image, add '--force' to rebuild images

  clean / nuke  removes the dependency containers and deletes all test images

  docs          will generate and open the test-helper documentation

  down          remove all dependency containers

  expose        expose the internal ports for access from the host

  logs          show docker-compose logs of the Pongo environment

  restart       shortcut, a combination of; down + up

  status        show status of the Pongo network, images, and containers

  up            start required dependency containers for testing

Maintenance actions:
  update        update embedded artifacts for building test images


Environment variables:
  KONG_VERSION  the specific Kong version to use when building the test image
                (note that the patch-version can be 'x' to use latest)

  KONG_IMAGE    the base Kong Docker image to use when building the test image

  KONG_LICENSE_DATA
                set this variable with the Kong Enterprise license data

  POSTGRES      the version of the Postgres dependency to use (default 9.5)
  CASSANDRA     the version of the Cassandra dependency to use (default 3.11)
  REDIS         the version of the Redis dependency to use (default 6.2.6)

Example usage:
  pongo run
  KONG_VERSION=3.3.x pongo run -v -o gtest ./spec/02-access_spec.lua
  POSTGRES=10 KONG_IMAGE=kong-ee pongo run
  pongo down

• Requirements
• Installation
• Update
• Configuration
• Do a test run
• Pongo on Windows
• Test dependencies
  • Postgres (Kong datastore)
  • Cassandra (Kong datastore)
  • grpcbin (mock grpc backend)
  • Redis (key-value store)
  • Squid (forward-proxy)
  • Dependency defaults
  • Dependency troubleshooting
  • Custom local dependencies
• Debugging
  • Accessing the logs
  • Direct access to service ports
• Test initialization
• Test coverage
• Setting up CI
• Running Pongo in Docker
• Releasing new Kong versions
• Changelog

Tools Pongo needs to run:

• docker-compose (and hence docker)
• curl
• realpath, for older MacOS versions you need the coreutils to be installed. This is easiest via the Homebrew package manager by doing:

  brew install coreutils
  

• depending on your environment you should set some environment variables.

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Clone the repository and install Pongo:

PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin
git clone https://github.com/Kong/kong-pongo.git
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
ln -s $(realpath kong-pongo/pongo.sh) ~/.local/bin/pongo

When Pongo builds images, it might fail when it is behind proxies and cannot verify the certificates. See configuration on how to disable verification.

Since the Pongo script is symbolic linked to ~/.local/bin/pongo, in order to update Pongo, all you have to do is to fetch latest changes from the Pongo repo:

cd <cloned Pongo repo>
git pull

# checkout the latest version tag (checkout 'master' for bleeding edge)
git checkout $(git tag | sort --version-sort | tail -n 1)

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Several environment variables are available for configuration:

• Docker credentials; DOCKER_USERNAME and DOCKER_PASSWORD to prevent rate- limits when pulling images.
• Kong license; set KONG_LICENSE_DATA with the Enterprise license to enable Enterprise features.
• Specify a custom image; set the image name/tag in KONG_IMAGE and make sure the image is locally available
• When the variable PONGO_INSECURE is set to anything else than 'false', it will configure curl and git (during the build) to switch off ssl verification. Please ensure you understand the security consequences when using this option! See also pongo build --help.

For Kong-internal use there are some additional variables:

• GITHUB_TOKEN the Github token to get access to the Kong Enterprise source code. This is only required for development builds, not for released versions of Kong.

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Get a shell into your plugin repository, and run pongo, for example:

git clone https://github.com/Kong/kong-plugin.git
cd kong-plugin

# auto pull and build the test images
pongo run

Some more elaborate examples:

# Run against a specific version of Kong and pass
# a number of Busted options
KONG_VERSION=3.2.2 pongo run -- -v -o gtest ./spec

# Run against the latest patch version of a Kong release using '.x'
KONG_VERSION=3.4.x pongo run

# Run against the latest stable version, using special label 'stable'
# (available labels are: 'stable', 'stable-ee', 'dev', and 'dev-ee')
KONG_VERSION=stable pongo run

# Run against a local image of Kong
KONG_IMAGE=kong-ee pongo run ./spec

The above command (pongo run) will automatically build the test image and start the test environment. When done, the test environment can be torn down by:

pongo down

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Pongo should run in Git-BASH if you have Git for Windows installed (and Docker for Windows).

An alternative to run Pongo on Windows is WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

• install WSL2

• install Docker for Windows

• from the Microsoft Store install Debian (search for Debian)

• start Debian (should be in your start menu)

• now from the prompt install Pongo and some dependencies;

  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install git curl coreutils
  
  cd ~
  git clone https://github.com/Kong/kong-pongo.git
  mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
  ln -s $(realpath kong-pongo/pongo.sh) ~/.local/bin/pongo
  PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin
  

• Open Docker for Windows and open the settings

• under "General" enable using the WSL2 engine

• under "Resources - WSL integration" enable integration with the Debian package

You can now edit your code with your favorite Windows IDE or editor and then run the tests with Pongo.

To give this a try using the template plugin;

• download or clone https://github.com/Kong/kong-plugin.git (assuming this to land in C:\users\tieske\code\kong-plugin)

• start Debian and at the prompt do:

  cd /mnt/c/users/tieske/code/kong-plugin
  pongo run
  

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Pongo can use a set of test dependencies that can be used to test against. Each can be enabled/disabled by respectively specifying --[dependency_name] or --no-[dependency-name] as options for the pongo up, pongo restart, and pongo run commands. The alternate way of specifying the dependencies is by adding them to the .pongo/pongorc file (see below).

The available dependencies are:

• Postgres Kong datastore (started by default)

  • Disable it with --no-postgres
  • The Postgres version is controlled by the POSTGRES environment variable

• Cassandra Kong datastore

  • Enable it with --cassandra
  • The Cassandra version is controlled by the CASSANDRA environment variable

• grpcbin mock grpc backend

  • Enable it with --grpcbin
  • The engine is moul/grpcbin
  • From within the environment it is available at:
    • grpcbin:9000 grpc over http
    • grpcbin:9001 grpc over http+tls

• Redis key-value store

  • Enable it with --redis
  • The Redis version is controlled by the REDIS environment variable
  • From within the environment the Redis instance is available at redis:6379, but from the test specs it should be accessed by using the helpers.redis_host field, and port 6379, to keep it portable to other test environments. Example:

    local helpers = require "spec.helpers"
    local redis_host = helpers.redis_host
    local redis_port = 6379

• Squid (forward-proxy)

  • Enable it with --squid

  • The Squid version is controlled by the SQUID environment variable

  • From within the environment the Squid instance is available at squid:3128. Essentially it would be configured as these standard environment variables:

    • http_proxy=http://squid:3128/
    • https_proxy=http://squid:3128/

    The configuration comes with basic-auth configuration, and a single user:

    • username: kong
    • password: king

    All access is to be authenticated by the proxy, except for the domain .mockbin.org, which is white-listed.

    Some test instructions to play with the proxy:

    # clean environment, start with squid and create a shell
    pongo down
    pongo up --squid --no-postgres
    pongo shell
    
    # connect to httpbin (http), while authenticating
    http --proxy=http:http://kong:king@squid:3128 --proxy=https:http://kong:king@squid:3128 http://httpbin.org/anything
    
    # https also works
    http --proxy=http:http://kong:king@squid:3128 --proxy=https:http://kong:king@squid:3128 https://httpbin.org/anything
    
    # connect unauthenticated to the whitelisted mockbin.org (http)
    http --proxy=http:http://squid:3128 --proxy=https:http://squid:3128 http://mockbin.org/request
    
    # and here https also works
    http --proxy=http:http://squid:3128 --proxy=https:http://squid:3128 https://mockbin.org/request

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The defaults do not make sense for every type of plugin and some dependencies (Cassandra for example) can slow down the tests. So to override the defaults on a per project/plugin basis, a .pongo/pongorc file can be added to the project.

The format of the file is very simple; each line contains 1 commandline option, eg. a .pongo/pongorc file for a plugin that only needs Postgres and Redis:

--no-cassandra
--redis

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When unable to leverage container health checks, they can be disabled setting the environment variable HEALTH_TIMEOUT=0. This will set the variable SERVICE_DISABLE_HEALTHCHECK=true, which can be used to disable the service health checks for the Pongo services in the docker composer files.

For example:

    healthcheck:
      test:
      - CMD
      - pg_isready
      - --dbname=kong_tests
      - --username=kong
      disable: ${SERVICE_DISABLE_HEALTHCHECK:-false}

To wait for the environment and run the tests one could run

export HEALTH_TIMEOUT=0
pongo up && sleep 10 && pongo run

When dependency containers are causing trouble, the logs can be accessed using the pongo logs command. This command is the same as docker-compose logs except that it operates on the Pongo environment specifically. Any additional options specified to the command will be passed to the underlying docker-compose logs command.

Some examples:

# show latest logs
pongo logs

# tail latest logs
pongo logs -f

# tail latest logs for the postgres dependency
pongo logs -f postgres

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If the included dependencies are not enough for testing a plugin, then Pongo allows you to specify your own dependencies. To create a custom local dependency you must add its name to the .pongo/pongorc file An example defining 2 extra dependencies; zipkin, and myservice:

--no-cassandra
--redis
--zipkin
--no-myservice

This defines both services, with zipkin being started by default and myservice only when specifying it like this;

pongo up --myservice

This only defines the dependency, but it also needs a configuration. The configuration is a docker-compose file specific for each dependency. So taking the above zipkin example we create a file named .pongo/zipkin.yml.

version: '3.5'

services:
  zipkin:
    image: openzipkin/zipkin:${ZIPKIN:-2.19}
    healthcheck:
      interval: 5s
      retries: 10
      test:
      - CMD
      - wget
      - localhost:9411/health
      timeout: 10s
      disable: ${SERVICE_DISABLE_HEALTHCHECK:-false}
    restart: on-failure
    stop_signal: SIGKILL
    networks:
      - ${NETWORK_NAME}

The components of the file:

• file name: based on the dependency name; ./pongo/<dep-name>.yml
• service name: this must be the dependency name as defined, in this case zipkin
• image is required, the environment variable ZIPKIN to override the default version 2.19 is optional
• healthcheck if available then Pongo uses the health-status to determine whether a dependency is ready and the test run can be started.
• networks should be included and left as-is to include the dependency in the network with the other containers.

Some helpfull examples:

• Dependencies requiring configuration files: see squid in the main Pongo docker-compose file.
• A custom dependency example: see the Zipkin plugin

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This section is about debugging plugin code. If you have trouble with the Pongo environment then check Dependency troubleshooting.

When running the tests, the Kong prefix (or working directory) will be set to ./servroot.

To track the error log (where any print or ngx.log statements will go) you can use the tail command

pongo tail

The above would be identical to:

tail -F ./servroot/logs/error.log

The above does not work in a CI environment. So how to get access to the logs in that case?

From the default .travis.yml (see chapter on CI), change the basic lines to run the commands as follows, from;

script:
- "../kong-pongo/pongo.sh lint"
- "../kong-pongo/pongo.sh run"

to;

script:
- "../kong-pongo/pongo.sh lint"
- "KONG_TEST_DONT_CLEAN=true ../kong-pongo/pongo.sh run"
- "cat servroot/logs/error.log"

Setting the KONG_TEST_DONT_CLEAN variable will instruct Kong to not clean up the working directory in between tests. And the final cat command will output the log to the Travis console.

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To directly access Kong from the host, or the datastores, the pongo expose command can be used to expose the internal ports to the host.

This allows for example to connect to Postgres on port 5432 to validate the contents of the database. Or when running pongo shell to manually start Kong, you can access all the regular Kong ports from the host, including the GUI's.

This has been implemented as a separate container that opens all those ports and relays them on the docker network to the actual service containers (the reason for this is that regular Pongo runs do not interfere with ports already in use on the host, only if expose is used there is a risk of failure because ports are already in use on the host)

Since it is technically a "dependency" it can be specified as a dependency as well.

so

pongo up
pongo expose

is equivalent to

pongo up --expose

See pongo expose --help for the ports.

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By default when the test container is started, it will look for a .rockspec file, if it finds one, then it will install that rockspec file with the --deps-only flag. Meaning it will not install that rock itself, but if it depends on any external libraries, those rocks will be installed. If the rock is already installed in the image, it will be uninstalled first.

For example; the Kong plugin session relies on the lua-resty-session rock. So by default it will install that dependency before starting the tests.

To modify the default behaviour there are 2 scripts that can be hooked up:

• .pongo/pongo-setup-host.sh this script will be executed (not sourced) right before the Kong test container is started. Hence this script runs on the host. The interpreter can be set using the regular shebang.

• .pongo/pongo-setup.sh is ran upon container start inside the Kong container. It will not be executed but sourced, and will run on /bin/bash as interpreter.

Both scripts will have an environment variable PONGO_COMMAND that will have the current command being executed, for example shell or run.

Below an example using both files. On the host it clones a dependency if it isn't available already. This prevents pulling it on each run, but makes sure it is available in CI. Then on each run it will install the dependency in the container first and then it will do the default action of installing all rockspecs found.

Example .pongo/pongo-setup-host.sh:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# this runs on the host, before the Kong container is started
if [ ! -d "my_dependency" ]; then
  git clone https://github.com/memyselfandi/my_dependency.git
fi

Example .pongo/pongo-setup.sh:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# this runs in the test container upon starting it
cd /kong-plugin/my_dependency
make install

# additionally run the default action of installing rockspec dependencies
/pongo/default-pongo-setup.sh

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Pongo has support for the LuaCov code coverage tool. But this is rather limited. LuaCov is not able to run in OpenResty, hence it will not report on integration tests, only on unit tests.

To enable LuaCov, run pongo init to create the .luacov configuration file, and then run the tests using the Busted --coverage option like this:

pongo run -- --coverage

After the test run the output files luacov.*.out files should be available.

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Pongo is easily added to a CI setup. The examples below will assume Github Actions, but can be easily converted to other engines.

• For Github the best option is to use the Pongo Github Action
• if your engine of preference runs itself in Docker, then checkout Pongo in Docker.
• to test against development images add a job with KONG_VERSION=dev,

Note: there is also a "dev-ee" for Kong Enterprise. But this requires a GitHub access token to fetch the Kong Enterprise source code, and must be specified as a GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable.

Here's a base setup for a plugin that will test against multiple Kong versions:

# .github/workflows/test.yml

name: "Test"

concurrency:
  group: ${{ github.workflow }} ${{ github.ref }}
  cancel-in-progress: ${{ github.event_name == 'pull_request' }}

on:
  pull_request: {}
  push:
    branches:
    - master
  schedule:
  - cron: '0 0 * * *'  # every day at midnight, to test against development

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    strategy:
      fail-fast: false
      matrix:
        kongVersion:
        - "2.8.x"
        - "3.5.x"
        - "dev"
        - "3.5.x.x"
        #- "dev-ee"    # Kong internal only, requires access to source code

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3

    - uses: Kong/kong-pongo-action@v1
      with:
        pongo_version: master
        kong_version: ${{ matrix.kongVersion }}
        # Kong internal users can use the Kong/kong-license action to get the license
        license: ${{ secrets.KONG_LICENSE_DATA }}

    - run: pongo run

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Pongo relies on Docker and Docker-compose to recreate environments and test setups. So what if your environment is running Pongo itself in a Docker container?

Docker-in-Docker has some serious issues when used in CI (as it was intended for Docker development only). The proposed solution in that blog post actually works with Pongo. By starting the container running Pongo with the

-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

option, the container will get control over the Docker deamon on the host. The means that the test environment spun up by Pongo will not run inside the Pongo container (as children) but along side the Pongo container (as siblings). To share the plugin code and tests with the (sibling) test container Pongo will need a shared working directory on the host. This working directory must be mapped to /pongo_wd on the container running Pongo.

Additionally the container id must be made available to the Pongo container. It must be in a file .containerid in the same working directory.

WARNING: make sure to read up on the security consequences of sharing docker.sock! You are allowing a Docker container to control the Docker deamon on the host!

For a working example see the Pongo repo.

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When new Kong versions are released, the test artifacts contained within this Pongo repository must be updated.

To do so there are some pre-requisites;

• have gh installed and configured
• have access to the kong-pongo (push) and kong-ee (read/clone) repositories on Github

Update the version as follows:

# The code-base (1st argument) is either "EE" (Enterprise) or "CE" (Opensource)
# 2nd argument is the version to add.
# 3rd argument makes it a test run if given

assets/add_version.sh "EE" "1.2.3" "test"

Here's an all-in-one command, edit the parameters as needed;

git clone --single-branch https://github.com/Kong/kong-pongo $TMPDIR/kong-pongo && $TMPDIR/kong-pongo/assets/add_version.sh "EE" "1.2.3" "test"; rm -rf $TMPDIR/kong-pongo

The result should be a new PR on the Pongo repo.

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