EchoChamber

EchoChamber is test harness and set of integration tests for the np1sec library. The platforms simulates real-world network conditions and peer behavior to produce programmer-friendly benchmark data.

Goals

• Enable automated testing of a protocol implementation
  • under a variety of network conditions
  • with peers exhibiting a variety of different behaviors
• High level test interface
  • Avoid the need to write lots of C++ test code
• Provide useful reports about how each peer behaves and what performance was like overall

Features

1. The ability to spin up an arbitrary number of clients
2. Facilitate communication between peers in a natural way
3. Provide a simple configuration language or API
4. Simulate an internal network as well as management of peers
5. Produce programmer-friendly logs/reports about tests

Setup

EchoChamber uses the py.test test framework to manage and run tests. All of the integration tests use the test np1sec client Jabberite and a local XMPP server. We recommend using a local Prosody XMPP server to more emulate a realistic client-server chat network.

First the np1sec library and Jabberite client must be built from source. Please refer to the README in the np1sec Github project (https://github.org/equalitie/np1sec) for installation instructions.

Next clone this git repository to your machine. It should be cloned to the same parent directory as the np1sec library:

  git clone git@github.com:equalitie/EchoChamber.git
  cd EchoChamber

On a Debian-based system the Prosody XMPP server and test dependencies can be installed as follows:

  sudo apt-get install prosody
  sudo service prosody stop # Stop the default prosody server
  pip install -r requirements.txt

Setup

Clone this git repository to your machine. Rename config.yml.example to config.yml and edit the file as appropriate.

To run EchoChamber, you need to install dependencies first, by launching:

  pip install -r requirements.txt

Running

EchoChamber uses the pytest framework for collecting and running EchoChamber tests. The EchoChamber specific pytest options are listed in the pytest help message (py.test --help).

  --show-cli-output     show output from all subprocesses (v. noisy)
  --debug-mode          Enable debug features such as interactive prompts and
                        invitation of external jabberite clients.
  --run-with-gdb        Run jabberite instances with GDB.
  -C ECHOCHAMBER_CONFIG, --echochamber-config=ECHOCHAMBER_CONFIG
                        Location of the EchoChamber config file.

As EchoChamber is based on pytest, all of it's standard options are available for use.

Test Invocation

Running the tests without interactive output:

py.test

Running the tests with extra logging:

py.test -s -v

Running the tests in debug mode:

py.test -s -v --debug-mode

A subset of tests can be run by providing a set of test filenames to run:

py.test -s -v test_connection.py