litmus/mkdocs/docs/experiments/concepts/chaos-resources/chaos-engine/engine-state.md

It is a user-defined flag to trigger chaos. Setting it to active ensures the successful execution of chaos. Patching it with stop aborts ongoing experiments. It has a corresponding flag in the chaosengine status field, called engineStatus which is updated by the controller based on the actual state of the ChaosEngine. It can be tuned via engineState field. It supports active and stop values.

??? info "View the state specification schema"

<table>
<tr>
  <th>Field</th>
  <td><code>.spec.engineState</code></td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <th>Description</th>
  <td>Flag to control the state of the chaosengine</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <th>Type</th>
  <td>Mandatory</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <th>Range</th>
  <td><code>active</code>, <code>stop</code></td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <th>Default</th>
  <td><code>active</code></td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <th>Notes</th>
  <td>The <code>engineState</code> in the spec is a user defined flag to trigger chaos. Setting it to <code>active</code> ensures successful execution of chaos. Patching it with <code>stop</code> aborts ongoing experiments. It has a corresponding flag in the chaosengine status field, called <code>engineStatus</code> which is updated by the controller based on actual state of the ChaosEngine.</td>
</tr>
</table>

Use the following example to tune this:

# contains the chaosengine state
# supports: active and stop states
apiVersion: litmuschaos.io/v1alpha1
kind: ChaosEngine
metadata:
  name: engine-nginx
spec:
  # contains the state of engine
  engineState: "active"
  annotationCheck: "false"
  appinfo:
    appns: "default"
    applabel: "app=nginx"
    appkind: "deployment"
  chaosServiceAccount: pod-delete-sa
  experiments:
  - name: pod-delete