We’ve been moving our applications from CircleCI to GitHub Actions in our company and we got stuck with a strange situation.

There has been no change to the project’s code, but our kafka integration tests started to fail in GH Actions machines. Everything works fine in CircleCI and locally (MacOS and Fedora linux machines).

Both CircleCI and GH Actions machines are running Ubuntu (tested versions were 18.04 and 20.04). MacOS was not tested in GH Actions as it doesn’t have Docker in it.

Here are the docker-compose and workflow files used by the build and integration tests:

• docker-compose.yml

version: '2.1'
services:

postgres:

container_name: listings-postgres

image: postgres:10-alpine

mem_limit: 500m

networks:

- listings-stack

ports:

- "5432:5432"

environment:

POSTGRES_DB: listings

POSTGRES_PASSWORD: listings

POSTGRES_USER: listings

PGUSER: listings

healthcheck:

test: ["CMD", "pg_isready"]

interval: 1s

timeout: 3s

retries: 30
listings-zookeeper:

container_name: listings-zookeeper

image: confluentinc/cp-zookeeper:6.2.0

environment:

ZOOKEEPER_CLIENT_PORT: 2181

ZOOKEEPER_TICK_TIME: 2000

networks:

- listings-stack

ports:

- "2181:2181"

healthcheck:

test: nc -z localhost 2181 || exit -1

interval: 10s

timeout: 5s

retries: 10
listings-kafka:

container_name: listings-kafka

image: confluentinc/cp-kafka:6.2.0

depends_on:

listings-zookeeper:

condition: service_healthy

environment:

KAFKA_BROKER_ID: 1

KAFKA_ADVERTISED_LISTENERS: PLAINTEXT_HOST://localhost:9092

KAFKA_LISTENER_SECURITY_PROTOCOL_MAP: PLAINTEXT:PLAINTEXT,PLAINTEXT_HOST:PLAINTEXT

KAFKA_INTER_BROKER_LISTENER_NAME: PLAINTEXT_HOST

KAFKA_OFFSETS_TOPIC_REPLICATION_FACTOR: 1

KAFKA_ZOOKEEPER_CONNECT: listings-zookeeper:2181

volumes:

- /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

networks:

- listings-stack

ports:

- "9092:9092"

healthcheck:

test: kafka-topics --bootstrap-server 127.0.0.1:9092 --list

interval: 10s

timeout: 10s

retries: 50
networks: {listings-stack: {}}

• build.yml

name: Build
on: [ pull_request ]
env:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.TUNNEL_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}

AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.TUNNEL_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}

AWS_DEFAULT_REGION: 'us-east-1'

CIRCLECI_KEY_TUNNEL: ${{ secrets.ID_RSA_CIRCLECI_TUNNEL }}
jobs:

build:

name: Listings-API Build

runs-on: [ self-hosted, zap ]
steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    with:
      token: ${{ secrets.GH_OLXBR_PAT }}
      submodules: recursive
      path: ./repo
      fetch-depth: 0

  - name: Set up JDK 11
    uses: actions/setup-java@v2
    with:
      distribution: 'adopt'
      java-version: '11'
      architecture: x64
      cache: 'gradle'

  - name: Docker up
    working-directory: ./repo
    run: docker-compose up -d

  - name: Build with Gradle
    working-directory: ./repo
    run: ./gradlew build -Dhttps.protocols=TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 -x integrationTest

  - name: Integration tests with Gradle
    working-directory: ./repo
    run: ./gradlew integrationTest -Dhttps.protocols=TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2

  - name: Sonarqube
    working-directory: ./repo
    env:
      GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_OLXBR_PAT }}
      SONAR_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.SONAR_TOKEN }}
    run: ./gradlew sonarqube --info -Dhttps.protocols=TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2

  - name: Docker down
    if: always()
    working-directory: ./repo
    run: docker-compose down --remove-orphans

  - name: Cleanup Gradle Cache
    # Remove some files from the Gradle cache, so they aren't cached by GitHub Actions.
    # Restoring these files from a GitHub Actions cache might cause problems for future builds.
    run: |
      rm -f ${{ env.HOME }}/.gradle/caches/modules-2/modules-2.lock
      rm -f ${{ env.HOME }}/.gradle/caches/modules-2/gc.properties

The integration tests are written using the Spock framework and the part where the errors occur are these:

  boolean compareRecordSend(String topicName, int expected) {
    def condition = new PollingConditions()
    condition.within(kafkaProperties.listener.pollTimeout.getSeconds() * 5) {
      assert expected == getRecordSendTotal(topicName)
    }
    return true
  }
int getRecordSendTotal(String topicName) {

kafkaTemplate.flush()

return kafkaTemplate.metrics().find {

it.key.name() == "record-send-total" && it.key.tags().get("topic") == topicName

}?.value?.metricValue() ?: 0

}

The error we’re getting is:

Condition not satisfied after 50.00 seconds and 496 attempts
    at spock.util.concurrent.PollingConditions.within(PollingConditions.java:185)
    at com.company.listings.KafkaAwareBaseSpec.compareRecordSend(KafkaAwareBaseSpec.groovy:31)
    at com.company.listings.application.worker.listener.notifier.ListingNotifierITSpec.should notify listings(ListingNotifierITSpec.groovy:44)
Caused by:
Condition not satisfied:

expected == getRecordSendTotal(topicName)
|        |  |                  |
10       |  0                  v4
            false

We’ve debugged the GH Actions machine (SSH into it) and run things manually. The error still happens, but if the integration tests are run a second time (as well as subsequent runs), everything works perfectly.

We’ve also tried to initialize all the necessary topics and send some messages to them preemptively, but the behavior was the same.

The questions we have are:

• Is there any issue when running Kafka dockerized in an Ubuntu machine (the error also occurred in a co-worker Ubuntu machine)?
• Any ideas on why this is happening?