Avocado Test Framework

Avocado is a test framework that is built on the experience accumulated with autotest, while improving on its weaknesses and shortcomings.

The main goal of the Avocado project is to provide a set of smart tools for automated testing and continuous integration. Among them, we can highlight:

• A powerful test runner;
• A multiplexer that allows tests to be run with different sets of variables;
• Test APIs for test writers;
• A database for results, with a web interface;
• A scheduler for setting up a test grid.

An extensive set of slides about avocado, including details about its architecture, main features and status is available in google-drive.

Using avocado

The most straightforward way of using avocado is to install packages available for your distro:

1. Fedora/RHEL

   Avocado is not yet officially packed in Fedora/RHEL, but you can use avocado yum repositories by putting corresponding file into /etc/yum.repos.d.

   • Fedora repo
   • RHEL repo

   and install it by yum install avocado (or using dnf)

Once you install it, you can start exploring it by checking the output of avocado --help and the test runner man-page, accessible via man avocado.

If you want to develop avocado, or run it directly from the git repository, you have a couple of options:

1. The avocado test runner was designed to run in tree, for rapid development prototypes. Just use:

   $ scripts/avocado --help
   

2. Installing avocado in the system is also an option, although remember that distutils has no uninstall functionality:

   $ sudo python setup.py install
   $ avocado --help
   

Documentation

Avocado comes with in tree documentation about the most advanced features and its API. It can be built with sphinx, but a publicly available build of the latest master branch documentation and releases can be seen on read the docs:

http://avocado-framework.readthedocs.org/

If you want to build the documentation yourself:

1. Make sure you have the package python-sphinx installed. For Fedora:

   $ sudo yum install python-sphinx
   

2. For Mint/Ubuntu/Debian:

   $ sudo apt-get install python-sphinx
   

3. Optionally, you can install the read the docs theme, that will make your in-tree documentation look just like the online version:

   $ sudo pip install sphinx_rtd_theme
   

4. Build the docs:

   $ make -C docs html
   

5. Once done, point your browser to:

   $ [your-browser] docs/build/html/index.html