ansible modules unit tests

[Willem de Groot]

Lots of code seems to be under test, but not all. I think function-level unit tests would benefit most of the more obscure code, such as authorized_key.parseoptions() ( https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/library/system/authorized_key#L174 )

I spent some time writing unit tests for this module, but I couldn't find an elegant way to make it work with nosetests. The problem is a hardcoded toplevel main() call, that will make a regular import call sys.exit because of the missing boilerplate code.

Some random ideas to enable module unit tests:

1. Find a way to load an Ansible module without executing main(). For example, with imp.load_module and stripping the main() call before evaluation. Quite ugly.
2. Refactor all modules to only call main() when __name__ is '__main__'. Lots of work, possibly backwards incompatible. 
3. Before importing, preprocess the module just like hacking/test-module does, to add the missing boilerplate code. Possibly slow. 
4. ...

What do you think?

 

[Michael DeHaan]

This is discussed quite a bit, and simply put, unit tests are totally inappropriate for something of this nature.

What we want are *integration* tests, and are going to be working to roll something out here.

It absolutely shouldn't be a unit test, because how in the world do you unit test ec2 with any reliability?    The code ends up lying to itself.

I'm not interested in considering *units* for something that needs better testing here, though currently underway is some work to clean up things like Runner's code to allow unit testing at a cleaner level *there*.

The modules are going to be tested with playbooks and we hope to have something open-sourced soon in the coming months that provides some end-to-end testing of modules and playbook constructs, in real world scenarios using live systems, that is also user expandable via pull request.

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Michael DeHaan <mic...@ansibleworks.com>
CTO, AnsibleWorks, Inc.
http://www.ansibleworks.com/