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The Chaos Toolkit, or as we love to call it “ctk”, is a simple CLI-driven tool who helps you write and run Chaos Engineering experiment. It supports any target platform you can think of through existing extensions or the ones you write as you need.

Chaos Toolkit is versatile and works really well in settings where other Chaos Engineering tools may not fit: cloud environments, datacenters, CI/CD, etc.

Provided you have Python 3.12+ installed, the recommended installation uses uv:

$ uv tool install chaostoolkit

You can also install it with pip, as before:

$ pip install -U chaostoolkit

Once you have installed the Chaos Toolkit you can use it through its simple command line tool.

Running an experiment is as simple as:

$ chaos run experiment.json

An experiment can declare the Python packages it needs. For example:

runtime:
  python:
    version: "3.14"
    dependencies:
      - chaostoolkit-kubernetes>=0.38

When chaos run or chaos validate sees this declaration, it asks uv to prepare the dependencies and runs the command in that Python environment. The current Chaos Toolkit installation and its environment are not modified. Setting isolated to true creates an isolated run environment; it defaults to false. Setting version selects the Python version used by uv and automatically enables isolation.

This feature requires the uv executable to be available on PATH. Without a runtime.python.dependencies declaration, Chaos Toolkit behaves exactly as it did before and expects extensions to already be installed.

For remote sources, controls needed to fetch or load the experiment must already be installed with Chaos Toolkit. A remote experiment may be fetched once to discover its dependencies and again inside the prepared runtime; remote experiment documents should therefore be immutable or versioned.

Chaos Toolkit's mission is to provide an open API to chaos engineering in all its forms. As such, we encourage and welcome you to join our open community Slack team to discuss and share your experiments and needs with the community. You can also use StackOverflow to ask any questions regarding using the Chaos Toolkit or Chaos Engineering.

If you'd prefer not to use Slack then we welcome the raising of GitHub issues on this repo for any questions, requests, or discussions around the Chaos Toolkit.

Finally you can always email contact@chaostoolkit.org with any questions as well.

Contributors to this project are welcome as this is an open-source effort that seeks discussions and continuous improvement.

From a code perspective, if you wish to contribute, you will need to run a Python 3.12+ environment. Please, fork this project, write unit tests to cover the proposed changes, implement the changes, ensure they meet the formatting standards set out by ruff, add an entry into CHANGELOG.md, and then raise a PR to the repository for review

The project is driven by PDM, so install it and you can run the following commands:

$ pdm install
$ pdm run test
$ pdm run format
$ pdm run lint

The Chaos Toolkit projects require all contributors must sign a Developer Certificate of Origin on each commit they would like to merge into the master branch of the repository. Please, make sure you can abide by the rules of the DCO before submitting a PR.