operating-k6-in-ci-cd

Operating k6 in CI/CD

Configure k6 for CI/CD pipelines, distributed testing on Kubernetes, and extension management.

Choose Your Path

• CI/CD Pipeline Setup → See reference/ci-cd-pipelines.md

  • GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins
  • Docker-based execution
  • Threshold-based pass/fail in pipelines

• Distributed Testing (Kubernetes) → See reference/k6-operator.md

  • k6-operator installation
  • TestRun CRD configuration
  • Scaling load across pods

• Extensions (xk6) → See reference/extensions.md

  • Building custom k6 binaries
  • Official and community extensions
  • Automatic extension resolution

Quick Start: GitHub Actions

name: k6 Load Test
on: [push]
jobs:
  k6:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: grafana/setup-k6-action@v1
      - uses: grafana/run-k6-action@v1
        with:
          path: tests/load-test.js

Quick Start: Docker

docker run --rm -i grafana/k6 run - < script.js

# With local script file
docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/scripts grafana/k6 run /scripts/test.js

# With environment variables
docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/scripts \
  -e BASE_URL=https://staging.example.com \
  grafana/k6 run /scripts/test.js

Key Concepts

Threshold-Based Pass/Fail

k6 exits with code 99 if thresholds fail. CI/CD pipelines use this to pass/fail the build:

export const options = {
  thresholds: {
    http_req_duration: ['p(95)<500'],  // Fails pipeline if p95 > 500ms
    http_req_failed: ['rate<0.01'],    // Fails pipeline if error rate > 1%
  },
};

Environment-Specific Configuration

const BASE_URL = __ENV.BASE_URL || 'https://api.example.com';
const TARGET_VUS = parseInt(__ENV.TARGET_VUS) || 10;

export const options = {
  vus: TARGET_VUS,
  duration: __ENV.DURATION || '5m',
};

Grafana Cloud k6 Integration

# Run locally, send results to cloud
K6_CLOUD_TOKEN=$TOKEN k6 cloud run --local-execution script.js

# Run entirely in cloud
K6_CLOUD_TOKEN=$TOKEN k6 cloud run script.js

Related Skills

• For generating test scripts: /k6:generating-api-load-tests
• For analyzing results: /k6:analyzing-test-results
• For resilience testing on Kubernetes: /k6:testing-resilience