Files
sanderling/docs/development/ci.md
T

4.8 KiB

title
title
CI

CI

ci.yml runs on every pull request: it builds, unit-tests, and drives two small web fixtures through headless Chrome. It never runs sanderling against a real app.

Two other workflows do, and both are workflow_dispatch only. They boot devices, build apps and take minutes, which is not what you want on every push, and neither is a merge gate.

folio

Actions -> folio -> Run workflow. Inputs pick the legs (all, android, ios, web), and override the seed, the wall-clock budget, and the step budget; 0 means "use the calibrated value in the workflow".

Each leg builds examples/folio for its platform, builds the CLI with only the tags that platform needs (make sanderling-android and friends), and runs examples/folio/sanderling/spec.ts through .github/scripts/folio-run.sh. That script is plain bash so you can reproduce a job locally:

SEED=3 MAX_STEPS=240 .github/scripts/folio-run.sh android

android and ios expect the bug. Folio double-submits a transaction when the submit button is double-tapped, and submitMovesBalanceByTypedAmount is the property that catches it. The runs pass --exit-on-violation, so:

exit meaning job
2 the run found a violation green
0 the run finished clean red: the fuzzer stopped finding a bug that is still there
1 something went wrong red: the harness broke

Distinguishing 0 from 1 is the whole point of the exit code: a job that only knew "non-zero" could not tell a working fuzzer from a broken emulator.

web is a health gate, not an expect-the-bug leg. The same spec logs into the wasmJs build and drives it to the transaction screen (the job asserts the trace reached AddTransactionScreen), but the submit property cannot fire there: it keys off state.lastAction, which the web runtime reports as null, and off the action's selector, which the web picker does not carry, since it emits coordinates and element identity never crosses the V8 boundary.

The wasmJs app is served with Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy and Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy headers, because its sqlite worker needs cross-origin isolation. Served without them the app loads a blank canvas and every step observes an empty accessibility tree.

The seeds in the workflow are calibrated, not guessed. On an M-series mac, android seed 3 finds the bug at step 110-116 (seeds 1, 2 and 4 run 120 steps clean) and ios seed 1 finds it at step 129-134, both against a 240-step budget. The web leg ran five seeds x 200 steps clean.

The ios leg passes --clear-data=false, because the job installs a fresh build immediately before the run and a freshly installed app is already clear state. The in-run reinstall is worth avoiding: simctl uninstall + install followed straight away by the XCTest runner's own launch fails with app.folio is unknown to FrontBoard maybe half the time. That used to hang the run outright; the launch RPC is bounded now, so it fails in about 90 seconds with a real error instead, but a failing leg is still a failing leg. The job timeouts are the backstop if it happens anyway.

Only one sanderling run may drive a given simulator at a time. The driver takes an advisory lock on the target's UDID and a second run is refused with the lock path in the message, because two runs interleaving app lifecycle leave the first run's automation session bound to a bundle the simulator no longer knows.

replay-ui

Actions -> replay-ui -> Run workflow. This one is dogfooding: it records a trace from test/browser/testdata/throwing (violations and uncaught exceptions, so every panel has something to render), serves it with sanderling replay, and fuzzes that UI with replay-ui/sanderling/spec.ts.

Every property there is a cross-panel agreement - two panels deriving the same fact by different paths have to say the same thing - so it holds for any trace and needs no recalibrating when the fixture changes. Any violation fails the job.

Reading a failure

Both workflows upload their run directories as artifacts, and write the step count, seed and violations to the job summary. To replay a failure:

gh run download <run-id> -n folio-android
sanderling replay <the downloaded runs directory>

That is the same UI the replay-ui workflow fuzzes. Open the step the summary named, and the Violations tab shows the witness: the property, the reason, and the extractor values at the step that caused it.

When a device leg flakes

Expecting a violation from a single seed is timing-sensitive, most of all on an emulator. Calibration reduces that; it does not remove it. If a platform starts failing across repeated dispatches with exit 0, do not raise the step budget blindly - run a seed sweep with the campaign tool (cmd/internal-tools/campaign), which exists for exactly this, and pin a seed that finds the bug with room to spare.