Puppet Cucumber Providers

puppet

At work we try, and sometimes even succeed, in using Test Driven Deployment so as one of my background projects I’ve been wrapping certain tools in to cucumber friendly forms. Over the last couple of days I’ve been grabbing ten minutes here and there to incorporate Puppet 2.6 in to the pile.

Feature: Puppetwrappers
  Puppet Provider Examples

  Scenario: Confirming package installation
    When a machine has been puppeted
    Then the bash package should be installed

  Scenario: Confirm doodoodoo package is absent
    When a machine has been puppeted
    Then the doodoodoo package should not be installed

  Scenario: Confirm cron service is running
    When a machine has been puppeted
    Then the cron service should be running 

  Scenario: Confirm tomcat6 service is not running
    When a machine has been puppeted
    Then the tomcat6 service should not be running

  Scenario: Confirm dwilson is in libvirtd group
    When a machine has been puppeted
    Then dwilson should be a member of libvirtd

  Scenario: Confirm dwilson has a uid of 1000
    When a machine has been puppeted
    Then dwilson should have a uid of 1000

  Scenario: Confirm dwilson has a given shell
    When a machine has been puppeted
    Then dwilson should have the /bin/bash shell

I really like using the puppet providers for this because of the abstraction benefits they provide. I can write steps to test packages, services or aspects of a user and not have to worry if a developer runs it on Fedora or Debian.

This is only a first draft, and the cucumber wording needs changing, but I thought I’d put it online to show how expressive cucumber can be for system tasks and how easy, and concise, it is to reuse the puppet providers. You can grab the puppet step code and the Puppet providers features to drop in to your own test harnesses and have a play with. The implementation is pretty simple, for example the code below is everything you need for the service scenarios:

Then /^the (.+) service should be running$/ do | service |
  service_status = Puppet::Type.type(:service).new(:name => service, :hasstatus => true).provider.status
  service_status.should == :running
end

Then /^the (.+) service should not be running$/ do | service |
  service_status = Puppet::Type.type(:service).new(:name =>service).provider.status
  service_status.should == :stopped
end

It’s worth mentioning that all the above will only work in 2.6 and above as the internal details returned by the providers are different to those in 2.5.