Testing

Moby has two active suites and one frozen one. The full policy is in TESTING.md.

Suites

Suite	Path	Status	What it covers
Unit	next to source files (*_test.go)	Active	Functions, types, small integrations within a package.
API integration	integration/	Active	HTTP requests against a real daemon; checks state and replies.
Legacy integration-cli	integration-cli/	Frozen	Original CLI-driven E2E tests. No new tests accepted.

Tests use gotest.tools/v3/assert for assertions and gotest.tools/v3/skip for environment guards.

Run them

make test-unit                   # unit only
make test-integration            # API integration suite (uses dockerd-in-docker)
make test                        # unit + integration + docker-py
make test-docker-py              # Python SDK conformance

Scope examples:

TESTDIRS=./daemon/... TESTFLAGS='-run TestKill' make test-unit
TEST_INTEGRATION_DIR=./integration/container make test-integration
TEST_FILTER=TestContainerCreate make test-integration

hack/test/unit and hack/make.sh test-integration do the actual work; make just wraps them with the dev container. You can run them directly inside make shell.

Writing tests

• Unit tests live in the same package. Prefer accepting unexported interfaces in production code so fakes can be supplied in tests; this is called out in TESTING.md.
• New endpoint? Add a happy-path test in integration/<area>/.
• New error case? Cover it with a unit test. Don't add a separate integration test per error path.
• Use skip.If(t, testEnv.IsRemoteDaemon(), "...") (and similar predicates from testutil/environment) so tests run only where they make sense.

Test environment

integration/ tests bring up a real dockerd and talk to it via the client module. The testutil/environment helpers expose predicates such as IsRemoteDaemon, IsLocalDaemon, IsRootless, and DaemonInfo(). See internal/testutil/.

Flaky tests

make test-integration-flaky runs each newly added integration test repeatedly, helping catch flakes before merge. The validate-pr.yml workflow exposes this.

Coverage

TESTCOVERAGE=1 make test-unit writes coverage profiles into bundles/. The CI uploads coverage to Codecov; config lives in .codecov.yml.