TESTING.md

saltstack-formula-ndenv

Testing salt formulas using Kitchen and Testinfra

Synopsis

Full test using Kitchen and Docker (used for CI)

$ gem install bundler
$ bundle install
$ kitchen test

You will find the above is slow, but that is because the test command combines creating, coverging, verifying and destroying each test stuite. When testing it's worth breaking each section up into individual commands.

$ kitchen create
$ kitchen converge
$ kitchen verify
$ kitchen destroy

Once you have run kitchen converge you will find you will only want to run the kitchen verify command while you develop your testinfra tests. verify will run the tests against a running docker container, so make sure your tests are nullipotent.

Description

If you're reading this, I'm assuming you're already familiar with SaltStack and you understand the importance of testing salt recipes/formulas.

There are various ways of testing formulas that involve a lot of boilerplate, but the canonical tool for testing salt recipes based on the Salt Stack Formulas github organisation is Chef's Kitchen.

Kitchen is great and very flexible. It allows you to use different verifiers.

• InSpec
• Shell
  • Serverspec (ruby)
  • Testinfra (python)

Verifiers can be in any language, and a lot of people seem to use Serverspec, but as SaltStack is written in Python, I have opted to use Testinfra which is also written in Python.

References

• Kitchen
• Kitchen and testinfra
• Saltstack, Docker and Testinfra
• Testinfra