os-autoinst

Table of Contents

• Getting started
• How to contribute
  • Rules for commits

The OS-autoinst project aims at providing a means to run fully automated tests. Especially to run tests of basic and low-level operating system components such as bootloader, kernel, installer and upgrade, which can not easily and safely be tested with other automated testing frameworks. However, it can just as well be used to test firefox and openoffice operation on top of a newly installed OS.

os-autoinst can be executed alone, but is currently designed to be executed together with openQA, the web user interface that allows to run more than one os-autoinst instance at the same time.

More information on os-autoinst and openQA can be found on http://os-autoinst.github.io/openQA/

Getting started

To install os-autoinst, you can see INSTALL

To execute an instance of os-autoinst, we need to create file named vars.json, that we use to store the values of the different variables that will configure and drive the behavior of the application.

There are some variables used by os-autoinst itself and other that are used by the tests. A minimal vars.json file can be:

{
   "DISTRI" :      "opensuse",
   "CASEDIR" :     "/full/path/for/tests",
   "NAME" :        "test-name",
   "ISO" :         "/full/path/for/iso",
   "VNC" :         "91",
   "BACKEND" :     "qemu",
   "DESKTOP" :     "kde"
}

Be advised that the file vars.json is read and also written by isotovideo so make sure to backup handcrafted versions of this file.

Now we can launch the application with:

$ ../os-autoinst/isotovideo

and we can use VNC to connect to the QEMU instance:

$ vncviewer localhost:91 -ViewOnly -Shared

Run isotovideo with the environment variable RUN_VNCVIEWER set to autostart a VNC viewer on the right port.

Run isotovideo with the environment variable RUN_DEBUGVIEWER to start the internal debug screenshot viewer updated with an always recent screenshot of the test run.

How to contribute

If you want to contribute to this project, please clone and send git-pull requests via https://github.com/os-autoinst/os-autoinst.

More information on the contribution can be found on http://os-autoinst.github.io/openQA/contact/, too.

Issues are tracked on https://progress.opensuse.org/projects/openqav3/

For an overview of the architecture, see doc/architecture.md.

Rules for commits

• Every commit is checked by Travis CI as soon as you create a pull request but you should run the os-autoinst tests locally, i.e. call

./autogen.sh
make

once to setup your workspace and before every commit

make check

• You may also run local tests on your machine or in your own development environment to verify everything works as expected.

• For git commit messages use the rules stated on How to Write a Git Commit Message as a reference

• Every pull request is reviewed in a peer review to give feedback on possible implications and how we can help each other to improve

If this is too much hassle for you feel free to provide incomplete pull requests for consideration or create an issue with a code change proposal.