Integration Tests of Cockpit

This directory contains automated integration tests for Cockpit, and the support files for them.

To run the tests on Fedora, refer to the HACKING guide for installation of all of the necessary build and test dependencies. There's no need to trigger a build manually - the test suite preparation step below will handle that.

If test failures are encountered that look like they may be related to problems with nested virtualization, refer to this Fedora guide for more details and recommendations on ensuring it is enabled correctly.

Introduction

Before running the tests, ensure Cockpit has been built where the test suite expects to find it (do NOT run the build step as root):

$ ./test/image-prepare

To run the integration tests run the following (do NOT run the integration tests as root):

$ ./test/verify/run-tests

The tests will automatically download the VM images they need, so expect that the initial run may take a couple of hours (there are quite a few images to retrieve for different scenario tests).

Alternatively you can run an individual test like this:

$ ./test/image-prepare
$ ./test/verify/check-session

To see more verbose output from the test, use the --verbose and/or --trace flags:

$ ./test/verify/check-session --verbose --trace

In addition if you specify --sit, then the test will wait on failure and allow you to log into cockpit and/or the test instance and diagnose the issue. An address will be printed of the test instance.

$ ./test/verify/check-session --trace --sit

Normally each test starts its own chromium headless browser process on a separate random port. To interactively follow what a test is doing, start the browser manually and tell the test which debug port it should attach to:

$ chromium-browser --remote-debugging-port=9222 about:blank
$ TEST_CDP_PORT=9222 ./test/verify/check-session --trace

Finally, you can conduct manual testing against a test image by starting the image like so:

 $ bots/vm-run -s cockpit.socket debian-stable

Once the machine is booted and the cockpit socket has been activated, a message will be printed describing how to access the virtual machine, via ssh and web. See the "Helpful tips" section below.

Details

The verify test suite is the main test suite:

• test/verify/run-tests: Run all tests
• test/verify/check-*: Run the selected tests

Test Configuration

You can set these environment variables to configure the test suite:

TEST_OS    The OS to run the tests in.  Currently supported values:
              "centos-8-stream"
              "debian-stable"
              "debian-testing"
              "fedora-31"
              "fedora-32"
              "fedora-coreos"
              "fedora-testing"
              "rhel-7-9"
              "rhel-8-3"
              "rhel-8-3-distropkg"
              "ubuntu-2004"
              "ubuntu-stable"
           "fedora-31" is the default (bots/machine/machine_core/constants.py)

TEST_JOBS  How many tests to run in parallel.  The default is 1.

TEST_CDP_PORT  Attach to an actually running browser that is compatible with
               the Chrome Debug Protocol, on the given port. Don't use this
               with parallel tests.

TEST_BROWSER  What browser should be used for testing. Currently supported values:
                 "chromium"
                 "firefox"
              "chromium" is the default.

TEST_SHOW_BROWSER  Set to run browser interactively. When not specified,
                   browser is run in headless mode.

Test machines and their images

The code under test is executed in one or more dedicated virtual machines, called the "test machines". Fresh test machines are started for each test. See the bots documentation for details about the tools and configuration for these.

These test machine images don't contain any Cockpit code yet. You can build and install the currently checked out working copy of Cockpit like this:

$ test/image-prepare

This either needs a configured/built tree (build in mock or a development VM) or cockpit's build dependencies installed.

image-prepare will prepare a test machine image used for the next test run. It will not modify the original image, but do all the preparation in an overlay in test/images.

A typical sequence of steps would thus be the following:

$ make                     # Build the code
$ test/image-prepare ...   # Install code to test
$ test/verify/check-...    # Run some tests

Each image-prepare invocation will always start from the pristine image and ignore the current overlay in test/images. It is thorough, but also rather slow. If you want to iterate on changing only JavaScript/HTML code, you can use this shortcut to copy updated webpacks into a prepared VM overlay image:

$ make && bots/image-customize -u dist:/usr/share/cockpit/ $TEST_OS

Use test/vm-reset to clean up all prepared overlays in test/images.

Running tests

Once you have a test machine image that contains the version of Cockpit that you want to test, you can run tests by picking a program and just executing it:

$ test/verify/check-connection

Many of the verify tests can also be run against an already running machine. Although be aware that lots of the tests change state on the target machine.

$ test/verify/check-connection --machine=10.1.1.2

The test/containers/ tests use the same VMs as the above test/verify/ ones. But they don't have a separate "prepare" step/script; instead, the first time you run test/containers/run-tests you need to use the -i option to build/install cockpit into the test VM. This needs to be done with a compatible TEST_OS (usually a recent fedora-*).

Selenium tests

The third class of integration tests use avocado and selenium to cover different browsers.

For more details on how to run and debug these tests see selenium hacking guide

Debugging tests

If you pass the -s ("sit on failure") option to a test program, it will pause when a failure occurs so that you can log into the test machine and investigate the problem.

A test will print out the commands to access it when it fails in this way. You can log into a running test-machine using ssh. See the "Helpful tips" section below.

You can also put calls to sit() into the tests themselves to stop them at strategic places.

That way, you can run a test cleanly while still being able to make quick changes, such as adding debugging output to JavaScript.

Guidelines for writing tests

If a test is not decorated with @nondestructive, it is OK for a test to destroy the test machine OS installation, or otherwise modify it without cleaning up. For example, it is OK to remove all of /etc just to see what happens. The next test will get a pristine test machine.

Tests decorated with @nondestructive will all run against the same test machine. The nondestructive test should clean up after itself and restore the state of the machine, such that the next nondestructive test is not impacted.

A fast running test suite is more important than independent, small test cases.

Thus, it is OK for tests to be long. Starting the test machine is so slow that we should run as many checks within a single session as make sense. Note that nondestructive tests do not suffer from this, and are much quicker.

Still, within a long test, try to have independent sections, where each section returns the machine to more or less the state that it was in before the section. This makes it easier to run these sections ad-hoc when doing incremental development.

Helpful tips

If you add a snippet like this to your ~/.ssh/config then you'll be able to log in to test machines without authentication:

Host 127.0.0.2
    User root
    Port 2201
    StrictHostKeyChecking no
    UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
    IdentityFile ~/src/cockpit/bots/machine/identity

Many cockpit developers take it a step further, and add an alias to allow typing ssh c:

Host 127.0.0.2 c
    Hostname 127.0.0.2
    User root
    ... etc

For web access, if you'd like to avoid Chromium (or Chrome) prompting about certificate errors while connecting to localhost, you can change the following setting:

chrome://flags/#allow-insecure-localhost