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Continuous Integration Checks

When you submit a pull request, some automated checks are ran for your code by the ClickHouse continuous integration (CI) system. This happens after a repository maintainer (someone from ClickHouse team) has screened your code and added the can be tested label to your pull request. The results of the checks are listed on the GitHub pull request page as described in the GitHub checks documentation. If a check is failing, you might be required to fix it. This page gives an overview of checks you may encounter, and what you can do to fix them.

If it looks like the check failure is not related to your changes, it may be some transient failure or an infrastructure problem. Push an empty commit to the pull request to restart the CI checks:

git reset
git commit --allow-empty
git push

If you are not sure what to do, ask a maintainer for help.

Merge With Master​

Verifies that the PR can be merged to master. If not, it will fail with the message Cannot fetch mergecommit. To fix this check, resolve the conflict as described in the GitHub documentation, or merge the master branch to your pull request branch using git.

Docs check​

Tries to build the ClickHouse documentation website. It can fail if you changed something in the documentation. Most probable reason is that some cross-link in the documentation is wrong. Go to the check report and look for ERROR and WARNING messages.

Description Check​

Check that the description of your pull request conforms to the template PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md. You have to specify a changelog category for your change (e.g., Bug Fix), and write a user-readable message describing the change for CHANGELOG.md

Push To DockerHub​

Builds docker images used for build and tests, then pushes them to DockerHub.

Marker Check​

This check means that the CI system started to process the pull request. When it has 'pending' status, it means that not all checks have been started yet. After all checks have been started, it changes status to 'success'.

Style Check​

Performs some simple regex-based checks of code style, using the utils/check-style/check-style binary (note that it can be run locally). If it fails, fix the style errors following the code style guide.

Running style check locally:​

mkdir -p /tmp/test_output
# running all checks
python3 tests/ci/style_check.py --no-push

# run specified check script (e.g.: ./check-mypy)
docker run --rm --volume=.:/ClickHouse --volume=/tmp/test_output:/test_output -u $(id -u ${USER}):$(id -g ${USER}) --cap-add=SYS_PTRACE --entrypoint= -w/ClickHouse/utils/check-style clickhouse/style-test ./check-mypy

# find all style check scripts under the directory:
cd ./utils/check-style

# Check duplicate includes
./check-duplicate-includes.sh

# Check c++ formatting
./check-style

# Check python formatting with black
./check-black

# Check python type hinting with mypy
./check-mypy

# Check python with flake8
./check-flake8

# Check code with codespell
./check-typos

# Check docs spelling
./check-doc-aspell

# Check whitespaces
./check-whitespaces

# Check github actions workflows
./check-workflows

# Check submodules
./check-submodules

# Check shell scripts with shellcheck
./shellcheck-run.sh

Fast Test​

Normally this is the first check that is ran for a PR. It builds ClickHouse and runs most of stateless functional tests, omitting some. If it fails, further checks are not started until it is fixed. Look at the report to see which tests fail, then reproduce the failure locally as described here.

Running Fast Test locally:​

mkdir -p /tmp/test_output
mkdir -p /tmp/fasttest-workspace
cd ClickHouse
# this docker command performs minimal ClickHouse build and run FastTests against it
docker run --rm --cap-add=SYS_PTRACE -u $(id -u ${USER}):$(id -g ${USER})  --network=host -e FASTTEST_WORKSPACE=/fasttest-workspace -e FASTTEST_OUTPUT=/test_output -e FASTTEST_SOURCE=/ClickHouse --cap-add=SYS_PTRACE -e stage=clone_submodules --volume=/tmp/fasttest-workspace:/fasttest-workspace --volume=.:/ClickHouse --volume=/tmp/test_output:/test_output clickhouse/fasttest

Status Page Files​

  • runlog.out.log is the general log that includes all other logs.
  • test_log.txt
  • submodule_log.txt contains the messages about cloning and checkouting needed submodules.
  • stderr.log
  • stdout.log
  • clickhouse-server.log
  • clone_log.txt
  • install_log.txt
  • clickhouse-server.err.log
  • build_log.txt
  • cmake_log.txt contains messages about the C/C++ and Linux flags check.

Status Page Columns​

  • Test name contains the name of the test (without the path e.g. all types of tests will be stripped to the name).
  • Test status -- one of Skipped, Success, or Fail.
  • Test time, sec. -- empty on this test.

Build Check​

Builds ClickHouse in various configurations for use in further steps. You have to fix the builds that fail. Build logs often has enough information to fix the error, but you might have to reproduce the failure locally. The cmake options can be found in the build log, grepping for cmake. Use these options and follow the general build process.

Report Details​

  • Compiler: clang-19, optionally with the name of a target platform
  • Build type: Debug or RelWithDebInfo (cmake).
  • Sanitizer: none (without sanitizers), address (ASan), memory (MSan), undefined (UBSan), or thread (TSan).
  • Status: success or fail
  • Build log: link to the building and files copying log, useful when build failed.
  • Build time.
  • Artifacts: build result files (with XXX being the server version e.g. 20.8.1.4344).
    • clickhouse-client_XXX_amd64.deb
    • clickhouse-common-static-dbg_XXX[+asan, +msan, +ubsan, +tsan]_amd64.deb
    • clickhouse-common-staticXXX_amd64.deb
    • clickhouse-server_XXX_amd64.deb
    • clickhouse: Main built binary.
    • clickhouse-odbc-bridge
    • unit_tests_dbms: GoogleTest binary with ClickHouse unit tests.
    • performance.tar.zst: Special package for performance tests.

Special Build Check​

Performs static analysis and code style checks using clang-tidy. The report is similar to the build check. Fix the errors found in the build log.

Running clang-tidy locally:​

There is a convenience packager script that runs the clang-tidy build in docker

mkdir build_tidy
./docker/packager/packager --output-dir=./build_tidy --package-type=binary --compiler=clang-19 --debug-build --clang-tidy

Functional Stateless Tests​

Runs stateless functional tests for ClickHouse binaries built in various configurations -- release, debug, with sanitizers, etc. Look at the report to see which tests fail, then reproduce the failure locally as described here. Note that you have to use the correct build configuration to reproduce -- a test might fail under AddressSanitizer but pass in Debug. Download the binary from CI build checks page, or build it locally.

Functional Stateful Tests​

Runs stateful functional tests. Treat them in the same way as the functional stateless tests. The difference is that they require hits and visits tables from the clickstream dataset to run.

Integration Tests​

Runs integration tests.

Bugfix validate check​

Checks that either a new test (functional or integration) or there some changed tests that fail with the binary built on master branch. This check is triggered when pull request has "pr-bugfix" label.

Stress Test​

Runs stateless functional tests concurrently from several clients to detect concurrency-related errors. If it fails:

* Fix all other test failures first;
* Look at the report to find the server logs and check them for possible causes
  of error.

Compatibility Check​

Checks that clickhouse binary runs on distributions with old libc versions. If it fails, ask a maintainer for help.

AST Fuzzer​

Runs randomly generated queries to catch program errors. If it fails, ask a maintainer for help.

Performance Tests​

Measure changes in query performance. This is the longest check that takes just below 6 hours to run. The performance test report is described in detail here.