Writing Salt Tests¶

Note

THIS TUTORIAL IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

Salt comes with a powerful integration and unit test suite. The test suite allows for the fully automated run of integration and/or unit tests from a single interface. The integration tests are surprisingly easy to write and can be written to be either destructive or non-destructive.

Getting Set Up For Tests¶

To walk through adding an integration test, start by getting the latest development code and the test system from GitHub:

Note

The develop branch often has failing tests and should always be considered a staging area. For a checkout that tests should be running perfectly on, please check out a specific release tag (such as v2014.1.4).

git clone [email protected]:saltstack/salt.git
pip install git+https://github.com/saltstack/salt-testing.git#egg=SaltTesting

Now that a fresh checkout is available run the test suite

Destructive vs Non-destructive¶

Since Salt is used to change the settings and behavior of systems, often, the best approach to run tests is to make actual changes to an underlying system. This is where the concept of destructive integration tests comes into play. Tests can be written to alter the system they are running on. This capability is what fills in the gap needed to properly test aspects of system management like package installation.

To write a destructive test import and use the destructiveTest decorator for the test method:

import integration
from salttesting.helpers import destructiveTest

class PkgTest(integration.ModuleCase):
    @destructiveTest
    def test_pkg_install(self):
        ret = self.run_function('pkg.install', name='finch')
        self.assertSaltTrueReturn(ret)
        ret = self.run_function('pkg.purge', name='finch')
        self.assertSaltTrueReturn(ret)

Automated Test Runs¶

SaltStack maintains a Jenkins server which can be viewed at http://jenkins.saltstack.com. The tests executed from this Jenkins server create fresh virtual machines for each test run, then execute the destructive tests on the new clean virtual machine. This allows for the execution of tests across supported platforms.