Unit testing reference modules and best practices

[Ben Sullivan]

Hi

I'm looking for some reference modules to share with my team to illustrate how to best use rspec-puppet to unit test Puppet DSL code.

I'm going to go through the Puppet Enterprise supported modules as I figured that was a reasonable place to start: https://forge.puppetlabs.com/modules?supported=yes

The team doesn't understand the value of rspec-puppet at present and I need to articulate arguments to get some buy-in.  At the moment we rely on long-running end to end tests which won't scale for us as our automation codebase grows.

Any tips/recommendations would be appreciated.

Many thanks

Ben

[Hunter Haugen]

We try hard to use rspec-puppet in effective ways, but you may still see some over-testing in the supported modules nonetheless :).

We use rspec-puppet to test that:

1. Manifests compile and templates parse (catches a lot of problems)

2. Conditional logic in manifests follows the expected paths for given inputs (various facts of operatingsystems [4], or various expected parameter values)

3. Conditional logic in templates actually creates config files as expected (make sure to have "negative" tests that throw false/undef in for validation to avoid blank entries)

4. And recently started testing "future parser" and "strict variables" on our modules (as of puppetlabs_spec_helper 0.6.0).

But what does rspec-puppet not do?

rspec-puppet will obviously NOT indicate when a configuration file's syntax cannot be understood by the actual service (apache [2], haproxy, sudoers, etc), that your package names are really correct (mongodb just changed all of their upstream package names [3]), or when command output from the system changes with versions (git 1.7 vs 1.9 in vcsrepo) but for those cases a few beaker-rspec [1] tests should give you extra assurances after you get rspec-puppet doing the most critical parts. (beaker-rspec is much slower than rspec-puppet, so we try to limit its use).

[1] https://github.com/puppetlabs/beaker-rspec/

[2] https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-apache/blob/1.1.0/spec/acceptance/mod_php_spec.rb#L56-L96 Example of verifying that php actually works

[3] https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-mongodb/blob/0.8.0/spec/acceptance/server_spec.rb#L45-L58 Example of verifying that packages actually install

[4] https://github.com/apenney/pe_fixtures is an example of a collection of facts to choose from

-Hunter

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[Haani Niyaz]

Hi Ben,

I am also looking for some reference material to better illustrate how to use rsepc puppet, a best practices of sorts to my team. Were you successful in finding some examples?

[Garrett Honeycutt]

Hello,

Last year I spoke[1] at LISA about why TDD works for configuration
management. Unfortunately, those slides are all pictures.. I teach an
interactive class about testing and last year gave a 1/2 day tutorial on
testing with rspec-puppet at LOAD. Those slides[2] explain why testing
is important, what are all the bits needed to get rspec-puppet to work
and what to test. It references a Vagrant setup[3] to get you started.
It installs some older gems, so you might be better off cloning one of
the modules below and using `rvm use 2.1.0 && bundle install` to get all
the testing dependencies going.

My vim module is an example[4] of testing a simple class that works on
many platforms and the nscd module is an example[5] of a module with a
ton of parameters and also supporting many platforms.

If you're interested in best practices around testing, I recently
starting working with Rubocop after noticing that a puppet-community
module was using it in their automated testing. Rubocop enforces ruby
style. Here's an example commit[6] that shows how I added it to a
module, modified the Travis-ci testing setup and all the changes to the
code that resulted.

[1] -
http://www.slideshare.net/gh/20141114-why-test-driven-development-tdd-works-for-sysadmins-lisa14

[2] - http://www.slideshare.net/gh/20140406-loa-daystddwithpuppettutorial

[3] - https://github.com/ghoneycutt/learnpuppet-tdd-vagrant

[4] -
https://github.com/ghoneycutt/puppet-module-vim/blob/master/spec/classes/init_spec.rb

[5] -
https://github.com/ghoneycutt/puppet-module-nscd/blob/master/spec/classes/init_spec.rb

[6] -
https://github.com/ghoneycutt/puppet-module-nscd/commit/de95ca517ed7df0bf2c34b0c8decff551a697fde

Best regards,
-g

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Garrett Honeycutt
@learnpuppet
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