Vagrant playground for tests in Puppet modules

Table of contents

1. Description
2. Setup
   1. Prereqs
   2. Project download
   3. VMs management
   4. VMs configuration
3. Playing inside the VMs
4. Module and test specs
   1. Location and naming
   2. Code
   3. Atom
5. Fire tests
6. References

Description

This project provides a Vagrant environment containing 3 VMs with vanilla installs of Debian, RockyLinux and OpenSUSE, allowing the user to play around with automated tests in Puppet modules

Setup

Prereqs

• Linux host
• Git
• Ruby
• Vagrant

Project download

• First time

  cd <Parent of project root directory>
  git clone git@github.com:EmersonPrado/vagrant-rspec-puppet.git
  cd vagrant-rspec-puppet

• Updates

  cd <Project root directory>
  git pull

VMs management

# Vagrant help
vagrant -h              # Lists common Vagrant commands
vagrant list-commands   # Lists all Vagrant commands
vagrant <Command> -h    # Shows specific command help

# General actions
vagrant status      # Informs all VMs statuses
vagrant up          # Turns all VMs on, creating when necessary
vagrant up --no-provision   # Idem, without configuration steps
vagrant provision   # Runs configuration steps again in all VMs
vagrant halt        # Shuts all VMs down
vagrant reload      # Restarts all VMs
vagrant destroy     # Stops and deletes all VMs

# Runs actions for selected VMs
vagrant <Command> <VM> [ <VM> ... ]                 # Exact match(es)
vagrant <Command> /<Pattern>/ [ /<Pattern>/ ... ]   # Regular expression match(es)

# Access VMs
vagrant ssh \{ <VM> | /<Pattern>/ \}              # Enters SSH session
# Exit with 'exit' command
vagrant ssh -c <Command> \{ <VM> | /<Pattern>/ \} # Executes single command

VMs configuration

vagrant up command will bring in VMs and install all necessary pieces of software:

• Ruby
• Ruby Bundler
• Rspec and its dependencies

Checkout Vagrantfile and bin/post.sh to see how it's done

Playing inside the VMs

You can get in every VM up and running with vagrant ssh <VM>. There, you can find this whole project under /vagrant (an automatic mount point which Vagrant provides by default to ease stuff). Also, you can play with OS, packages, Gems, code, tests, etc., just like you'd do with any Linux host.

Keep in mind the /vagrant mount point is shared - any change in a VM will show in all the others, and in the host repository.

Once satisfied with playing, just enter exit, and you're back to your workstation. If needed, you can restart (vagrant reload), reprovision (vagrant provision) or even rebuild (vagrant destroy && vagrant up) the VMs. This is the exact greatness of Vagrant.

Module and test specs

See References section for the docs mentioned below

Location and naming

All Puppet code and tests should go inside <Project root dir>/rspec_test.

Be sure to follow official conventions for Puppet's directories, files and naming. Also, naming conventions inside official rspec-puppet docs are mandatory for the tests to find their target code.

Code

Write your Puppet code normally, following official language docs.

For unit tests, find (limited) tutorial and docs in rspec-puppet's official page and a nice walktrough inside Puppet Blog.

This project includes a very simple class rspec_test, a very simple defined type rspec_test::type in, respectvely, manifests/init.pp and manifests/type.pp, and a set of unit tests for them in spec/classes/init_spec.rb and spec/defines/rspec_test__type_spec.rb. They serve as examples and a starting point - understanding them makes it easy to go further.

Atom

For those using Atom editor, I intentionally made (via .atomignore) the Puppet code hidden when one opens the root project directory in Atom. The idea is to keep infrastructure code apart from automation code. So, to manage module and specs, just open <Project root dir>/rspec_test. Or, if you prefer everything together, just remove line rspec_test/ from .atomignore.

Fire tests

All these tests use Rake for setup and run. This command does everything magically:

bundle exec rake validate lint spec

It's quite tempting - and might even work - to run bare rake command as:

rake validate lint spec

But it will run the OS provided rake, instead of the Ruby Bundler provided one. Bundler guarantees compatible Gems for the whole test setup. The OS provided rake is outside this setup, and may be compatible just out of luck. No project of mine will ever support luck.

But, since we're talking automation here, there's a script in this project which runs tests on all VMs. Just make sure all VMs are up and running and call the script:

vagrant up      # This takes time

vagrant status
...
debian                    running (virtualbox)
redhat                    running (virtualbox)
opensuse                  running (virtualbox)

bin/test.sh     # Shows output below for each VM
<VM>
---> syntax:manifests
---> syntax:templates
---> syntax:hiera:yaml
...
14 examples, 0 failures

The number of examples is the amount of validations for all tests. Will vary as the project grows and as you play with specs.

References

• Puppet official docs
  • Directories and files
  • Naming conventions
  • Language
• Puppet Blog
  • Unit testing with rspec-puppet - for beginners (Blog Puppet)
• rspec-puppet official page
  • All docs
• Community
  • Setting up Puppet module testing from scratch - Alex Harvey (great and highly recommended series)
    • Part I, Puppet-syntax, Puppet-lint and Rspec-puppet
    • Part II, Beaker for module testing
    • Part III, Travis CI