(Hello again. I haven’t blogged in a while. But since I’m growing weary of platforms such as medium. Here we go.) I’ve recently spent too much a lot of time with Ansible. Once I got into the rhythm of playbooks, roles and maybe modules/libraries, I desperately needed a way to test my YAML. And by testing, I didn’t mean the annoying linting that Ansible ships with, but actual (integration) tests to verify everything works....
I’m a huge advocate of CI and one service in particular called Travis-Ci. Travis-CI runs a continuous integration platform for both open source and commercial products. In a nutshell: Travis-CI listens for a commit to a Github repository and runs your test suite. Simple as that, no Jenkins required. At Imagine Easy we happily take advantage of both. :) So what’s wrong? For some reason, every other open source project (and probably a lot of closed source projects), use Travis-CI wrong in a way, that it will eventually break your builds....
Testing is important — most people understand that by now. A lot of people write tests for their open source code already, but in-house testing is still hard. For example, many of us had an encounter with Jenkins: it runs well to a point where it becomes harder to maintain the Jenkins than it is to write tests. Another obstacle is test setup and environments: When I write and run tests, there is sometimes only so much I can do to mock and avoid actual calls to my storage backend....
I’m sure most of you noticed that with the recent upgrade of PHPUnit to version 3.6, a lot of breakage was introduced in various projects. And for example Zend Framework 1.x won’t update to the latest version either. When I ranted on twitter someone send me Christer Edvartsen’s blog post on how to setup multiple versions of PHPUnit. It’s really neat since it walks you through the setup step by step and you learn about things such as --installroot on the way....
Update, 2011-06-16, 12:15 AM Thanks for the comments. (I swear I had something like that before and it didn’t work!) Here’s the solution: — Original blog entry — I wrote a couple tests for a small CouchDB access wrapper today. But when I wrote the implementation itself, I realized that my class setup depends on an actual CouchDB server being available and here my journey began. Example code Consider the following example:...