Monthly Archives: October 2013

Infrastructure testing with Jenkins, Puppet and Vagrant at Agile Testing Days

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
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agiletdThis week I’m in Postdam/Berlin giving a talk Infrastructure testing with Jenkins, Puppet and Vagrant at Agile Testing Days. Showing examples of using Puppet, Vagrant and other tools to implement a source code to production continuous delivery cycle.

Slides are up in SlideShare, and source code is available at GitHub.

Extend Continuous Integration to automatically test your infrastructure.

Continuous Integration can be extended to test deployments and production environments, in a Continuous Delivery cycle, using infrastructure-as-code tools like Puppet, allowing to manage multiple servers and their configurations, and test the infrastructure the same way continuous integration tools do with developers’ code.

Puppet is an infrastructure-as-code tool that allows easy and automated provisioning of servers, defining the packages, configuration, services, … in code. Enabling DevOps culture, tools like Puppet help drive Agile development all the way to operations and systems administration, and along with continuous integration tools like Jenkins, it is a key piece to accomplish repeatability and continuous delivery, automating the operations side during development, QA or production, and enabling testing of systems configuration.

Using Vagrant, a command line automation layer for VirtualBox, we can easily spin off virtual machines with the same configuration as production servers, run our test suite, and tear them down afterwards.

We will show how to set up automated testing of an application and associated infrastructure and configurations, creating on demand virtual machines for testing, as part of your continuous integration process.

Testing Puppet and Hiera

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
1

Puppet Labs logoAt MaestroDev we have been using Puppet 3 for a quite some time now, and one of the main reasons to upgrade from Puppet 2.x was the ability of using Hiera as a data backend for all the variables that customize the different vms. We don’t have a lot of machines but pretty much all of them have some difference so Hiera allows us to have the same manifests and modules apply to all the machines by just using different parameters in each server.

But testing Hiera is not that simple. With rspec-puppet you can test each class by passing parameters, but how can you test a class that calls another class and so on, and at some point there you need to inject a parameter?

Well, this is possible with the hiera-puppet-helper gem you can stub the hiera data backend

source 'https://rubygems.org'

group :rake do
gem 'puppet'
gem 'rspec-puppet'
gem 'hiera-puppet-helper'
gem 'rake'
gem 'puppetlabs_spec_helper'
end

require 'puppetlabs_spec_helper/module_spec_helper'
require 'hiera-puppet-helper/rspec'
require 'hiera'
require 'puppet/indirector/hiera'

# config hiera to work with let(:hiera_data)
def hiera_stub
  config = Hiera::Config.load(hiera_config)
  config[:logger] = 'puppet'
  Hiera.new(:config => config)
end

RSpec.configure do |c|
  c.mock_framework = :rspec

  c.before(:each) do
    Puppet::Indirector::Hiera.stub(:hiera => hiera_stub)
  end

end

And then you can use let(:hiera_data) to inject any parameters automatically into the puppet classes from your rspec tests.

require 'spec_helper'

describe 'mymodule::myclass' do

let(:hiera_data) {{
  'mymodule::myclass::myparam' => 'myvalue'
}}

it { should contain_class('mymodule::myclass').with_myparam('myvalue') }

Check out a full module using hiera-puppet-helper at maestro_nodes.