Conformance Test Suite

Dugite's correctness story rests on three layers:

1. Conformance — byte-exact alignment vs upstream Cardano artefacts, verified by replay. This page.
2. Feature compatibility — what protocol features the node implements. See the wiki Protocol Compliance page.
3. Operational soak testing — sustained behaviour on live testnets (preview, preprod) and the local devnet.

This page documents the conformance suite: where the upstream fixtures come from, what each area validates, and how to replay any of them locally.

The corpus model

upstream repos (SHA-pinned in sources.toml)
       │
       ▼
regenerate-conformance-corpus workflow
       │  produces 7 tarballs
       ▼
dugite GitHub release (tag pinned in manifest.toml)
       │
       ▼
just download-upstream-fixtures
       │
       ▼
dugite-conformance test harness (DUGITE_REQUIRE_UPSTREAM=1)

Upstream sources are pinned by commit SHA (or tag) in tests/conformance/upstream/sources.toml. The regenerate-conformance-corpus workflow consumes those pins, materialises the seven fixture areas into tarballs, and publishes them as assets of a single dugite GitHub release. Consumers (CI and local developers alike) then pin to that release tag via tests/conformance/upstream/manifest.toml, so a single fetch lands every fixture area at a known good combination. Tarballs are cached by content hash of manifest.toml, so bumping the tag invalidates the cache automatically.

This two-level pinning separates "what upstream version we test against" (sources.toml, only changes when we want to bump) from "what corpus the test run consumed" (manifest.toml, deterministic and cacheable).

Status

Per-area detail

UPLC (Plutus)

Source: IntersectMBO/plutus, pinned to tag 1.65.0.0 in sources.toml.

What's validated: 999 evaluation test cases from plutus-conformance/test-cases/uplc/evaluation/. Each test case provides a UPLC program and the expected result (a term, a budget exhaustion, or a specific runtime error). The dugite-uplc CEK machine evaluates each program and the harness compares term-for-term, budget-for-budget against the expected output.

Status: 100% passing. The skip list is empty as of v1.7.0. The harness covers normalisation by evaluation (NbE) readback, per-builtin cost model wiring, CIP-122 bit ordering, BLS LE scalar handling with null augmentation, and BIP-340 verify_raw semantics (not the SHA-256-wrapped verify).

Replay locally:

just download-upstream-fixtures
just test-conformance-uplc

ouroboros-consensus

Source: IntersectMBO/ouroboros-consensus, SHA-pinned in sources.toml.

What's validated: Era-tagged golden files for Cardano blocks and headers. The harness exercises the in-house multi-era CBOR decoder against fixtures captured directly from the upstream Haskell encoders, asserting round-trip and structural equivalence per era.

Status: passing across all eras (Byron, Shelley, Allegra, Mary, Alonzo, Babbage, Conway).

Replay locally:

just download-upstream-fixtures
just test-conformance-ouroboros-consensus

cardano-ledger

Source: IntersectMBO/cardano-ledger, SHA-pinned in sources.toml.

What's validated: Three classes of fixture. Genesis JSON for each era is parsed and structurally compared. The CDDL schema is loaded and exercised against representative documents. Golden transaction CBOR is decoded and asserted for byte-equality on re-encode.

Status: passing.

Replay locally:

just download-upstream-fixtures
just test-conformance-cardano-ledger

cardano-node

Source: IntersectMBO/cardano-node, SHA-pinned in sources.toml.

What's validated: Genesis spec files (shelley-genesis.json, alonzo-genesis.json, conway-genesis.json and their Byron counterpart). The harness asserts that dugite parses each spec into its internal genesis types and that the resulting types preserve every documented field.

Status: passing.

Replay locally:

just download-upstream-fixtures
just test-conformance-cardano-node

ledger-rules (ImpSpec)

Source: IntersectMBO/cardano-ledger ImpSpec, SHA-pinned in sources.toml. The corpus regeneration pipeline builds cardano-ledger from source (GHC 9.6.5 + cabal 3.10.x, ≈35 min cold / 5 min cached) and runs the upstream ImpSpec conformance suite with CONFORMANCE_CBOR_DUMP_PATH set to capture every test vector as CBOR.

What's validated: Two STS-rule families — NEWEPOCH (epoch-boundary transitions) and LEDGER (transaction application). The harness replays each captured CBOR vector through the corresponding dugite ledger code path and compares the resulting state byte-for-byte.

Status: passing. SKIP_LIST in tests/conformance/src/upstream/ledger_rules_replay/mod.rs is empty.

Replay locally:

just download-upstream-fixtures
just test-conformance-ledger-rules

cardano-base

Source: IntersectMBO/cardano-base, SHA-pinned in sources.toml.

What's validated: VRF v03 test vectors. Each vector ships an input message, a signing key, an expected proof, and an expected output hash. The harness exercises the dugite VRF implementation against every vector and asserts byte-equality on both the proof and the output, which is what guarantees Praos-compatible leader election.

Status: passing.

Replay locally:

just download-upstream-fixtures
just test-conformance-cardano-base

mithril

Source: input-output-hk/mithril, SHA-pinned in sources.toml.

What's validated: Mithril certificate fixture JSON. The harness loads each certificate, verifies the aggregate signature, and asserts structural equivalence against the upstream-captured form.

Status: passing.

Replay locally:

just download-upstream-fixtures
just test-conformance-mithril

CI integration

The upstream-conformance job in .github/workflows/ci.yml runs both the UPLC suite and the upstream tests with the DUGITE_REQUIRE_UPSTREAM=1 environment variable set. This variable makes a missing fixture a hard failure rather than a silent skip — the gate exists specifically to stop the suite from quietly degrading to a no-op when something is wrong with the fixture cache or download.

Fixture tarballs are cached on the CI runner, keyed by the SHA-256 content hash of tests/conformance/upstream/manifest.toml. Bumping [release].tag in that file invalidates the cache automatically; no separate cache-bust step is needed.

Updating the corpus

To adopt a new upstream version:

1. Edit tests/conformance/upstream/sources.toml, bumping the SHA (or tag for the plutus area) of the area you want to refresh.
2. Trigger the regenerate-conformance-corpus workflow on GitHub (manual dispatch, or wait for the weekly automatic run). It produces a new dugite release tagged conformance-corpus-v<timestamp> with the seven tarballs attached.
3. Update [release].tag in tests/conformance/upstream/manifest.toml to point at the new release tag.
4. Run just download-upstream-fixtures && just test-conformance locally.
5. Fix any test fallout, then commit the sources.toml + manifest.toml updates together with the code changes.

See also

• Benchmarks — performance evidence.
• Wiki Protocol Compliance — feature-by-feature compatibility catalogue.
• Wiki Known Issues — open gaps and follow-ups.