InfraTestingHelpers

Your helping hand for infrastructure code testing

InfraTestingHelpers provides integrations with Vagrant, Puppet and Serverspec to make infrastructure code testing easy! I'll show you around to see how it can help you too. There is some assumed knowledge of Serverspec so have a read of the [tutorial] if you haven't done so already

Lets say you've written some tests for Serverspec that test your Puppet modules. InfraTestingHelpers provide a way to run your Puppet code against a Vagrant box before validating with Serverspec

Install with gem install infra-testing-helpers

Next, lets have a look at your spec_helper.rb (probably generated by Serverspec) and add the parts we need in for InfraTestingHelpers.

...
require 'infra_testing_helpers'
InfraTestingHelpers.project_root = File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../')
InfraTestingHelpers.module_path = ['modules/', 'another_module_path/']
InfraTestingHelpers.site_pp = 'Exec { path => "/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin" }'
InfraTestingHelpers.vagrant_shared_folder = '/etc/puppet'
...

• require 'infra_testing_helpers' mixes in the functions we will use later in our specs as well as sets up a global before hook in RSpec.
• InfraTestingHelpers.project_root is the directory the Vagrantfile is located it. This is manditory
• InfraTestingHelpers.module_path is the location of your modules. This defaults to just modules/ if nothing is specified.
• InfraTestingHelpers.site_pp is the contents of your own site.pp file. If yours is rather large, you might want to dynamically populate this (File.read). Again, this is optional.
• InfraTestingHelpers.vagrant_shared_folder reflects where your shared folder is in your Vagrantfile. This defaults to /vagrant.

Lets look at an example spec modules/apache/spec/default/apache_spec.rb.

require 'spec_helper'
apply_manifest 'include apache'

describe 'apache' do

  describe 'its default MPM mode is perfork' do
    describe process('httpd') do
      it { should be_running }
    end
  end
  
  describe 'worker mode' do
    before do
      apply_manifest 'class {"apache": mpm => "worker"}'
    end
    describe process('httpd.woker') do
      it { should be_running }
    end
  end
  
end

Lets apply the manifest with rspec modules/apache/spec/default/apache_spec.rb.

Notice: Compiled catalog for vagrant-ubuntu-trusty-64.local in environment production in 0.05 seconds
Notice: Finished catalog run in 0.03 seconds
.Notice: Compiled catalog for vagrant-ubuntu-trusty-64.local in environment production in 0.04 seconds
Notice: Finished catalog run in 0.01 seconds
.
Finished in 6.92 seconds (files took 5.05 seconds to load)
2 examples, 0 failures

apply_manifest will apply Puppet code differently depending on the scope in which it is called. In the global rspec scope, it will apply the manifests before running any tests. If you have multiple specs with apply_manifest in the global scope, they are lazily evaluated and run as a single puppet apply. This helps speed up Puppet runs and can detect duplicate resource definitions.

When apply_manifests is run within a before block it is applied when the block is evaluated. This is useful for testing manifests that can not co-exist with others or for testing different arguments to the same manifest.