The Chaos Toolkit is a free, open source project that enables you to create and apply Chaos Experiments to discover, and eventually improve and address, weaknesses across your system's infrastructure, platform and application levels.
This tutorial takes you through the setup of the Chaos Toolkit's chaos
command. It also teaches you how Chaos Toolkit Extensions can be used to select which layers and
technologies can be targetted by your experiments when added into your
Chaos Toolkit environment.
Great start! You have installed the Chaos Toolkit in a Python virtual environment seen how simple it is to install and enable new integrations through for your chaos experiments using Chaos Toolkit Extensions.
Now you're all set to write and run your first Chaos Experiment using the Chaos Toolkit in the next scenario of this tutorial...

Steps
Setting up the Chaos Toolkit
Install the Chaos Toolkit CLI
The Chaos Toolkit CLI, called chaos
, is a Python program that is executed
in your terminal. It exposes various built-in commands performing different
tasks.
The Chaos Toolkit expects Python 3 to run. Let's make sure you run at least Python 3.5:
python3 -V
Usually, the python
binary refers to Python 2 so make sure you use python3
in your commands.
As a Python program, it is best install it in its own virtual environment. Let's create it as follows:
mkdir ~/.venvs && python3 -m venv ~/.venvs/chaostk
Once the virtual environment installed, you need to activate it in your current terminal session:
source ~/.venvs/chaostk/bin/activate
We're going to use pip
to manage the dependencies and install the Chaos
Toolkit. Let's first make sure we have the latest and greatest pip
installed:
pip install -U pip
Then we can install the Chaos Toolkit itself by running the following:
pip install -U chaostoolkit
Note that pip
may complain while installing some dependencies, these
warnings are nothing to worry about and will not prevent those dependencies
from being installed.
Now, the chaos
comand should be available:
chaos --help
Next, you need to learn how to install extensions to provide new probes and actions to your Chaos Toolkit environment.