Smoke Testing Your Control Repo

We don’t want to be responsible for a full testing framework for each module we use in our infrastructure, including all community modules. But we also want to at least validate that they all work the way we’re using them before deploying into production.

For this we use Onceover, which bills itself as

The gateway drug to automated infrastructure testing with Puppet!

This is a tool to automatically run basic tests on an entire Puppet control repository. It will parse the Puppetfile, environment.conf, and others – then run basic validations to ensure that each role or profile class will compile with the facts and data your environment provides.

Setup and Configuration

Like many tools in the Vox Pupuli ecosystem, Onceover is shipped as a gem. This means that you’ll run it with Bundler.

In the root of your control repository:

Add onceover to your Gemfile:

gem 'onceover'

Install and initialize the boilerplate:

bundle install
bundle exec onceover init

Then edit the configuration file at spec/onceover.yaml. The following settings will test all role classes for specific versions of Debian, Ubuntu, and Solaris machines. It will also make sure that the core vendored modules from the puppet-agent package are available.

classes:
  - /^role::/

nodes:
  - Debian-10-amd64
  - Ubuntu-20.04-64
  - solaris-11.2-sparc-64

test_matrix:
  - all_nodes:
      classes: 'all_classes'
      tests: 'spec'
opts:
  auto_vendored: true

Running the Tests

When you run tests, Onceover will use r10k to temporarily install all the modules specified in your Puppetfile as fixtures and then run basic it_compiles spec tests on each class matching the classes setting in your configuration.

bundle exec onceover run spec

More

This is just the most basic usage of Onceover. If needed, you can add your own custom spec tests, mock functions, generate custom factsets, and more. See the project’s own documentation for all the details.