Puppet & RSpec
As at the 21st April 2017, Puppet and RSpec testing is still an issue, with .fixtures.yml not full functioning as it should, that is loading dependencies into the spec/fixtures directory.
Even when you place your .fixtures.yml in the root of your project directory, which is to say the module where the spec directory lives along with the modules and manifest, and you run the puppet-spec-init or rspec or rake commands your fixtures file is ignored, and the only module linked is the current module.
It is essential that after creating your module with the puppet module generate command you will get the necessary layout for your puppet module. Once you start to build your module you’ll eventually want to add some code spec tests to ensure that someone doesn’t break the existing code.
ServerSpec tests can be run independently of your code, so the key difference is that RSpec is there to perform tests on your code and not the final server build.
To fix this means you still need to deal with all your module dependencies manually, so here are the steps.
Example project space;
Example project space;
The Rakefile
require 'rspec-puppet/rake_task'begin if Gem::Specification::find_by_name('puppet-lint') require 'puppet-lint/tasks/puppet-lint' PuppetLint.configuration.send('disable_autoloader_layout') PuppetLint.configuration.ignore_paths = ["spec/**/*.pp", "vendor/**/*.pp"] task :default => [:rspec, :lint] endrescue Gem::LoadError task :default => :rspecend
This file controls what will happen when the tests run, such as in this example a linter will run against your code first, and certain files will be ignores by the linter as they are not puppet code.
The spec_helper.rb file
This file defines other files required to help perform the testing, and where the files to test can be located.
require 'rspec-puppet/spec_helper'
fixture_path = File.expand_path(File.join(__FILE__, '..', 'fixtures'))
RSpec.configure do |c| c.module_path = File.join(fixture_path, 'modules') c.manifest_dir = File.join(fixture_path, 'manifests') c.environmentpath = File.join(Dir.pwd, 'spec') end
Preparing the module dependencies
First let’s take a look at a sample directory layout of what is required;
mysqlmodule
├── Gemfile
├── Gemfile.lock
├── manifests
│ └── init.pp
├── Rakefile
├── spec
│ ├── classes
│ │ └── mysqltest_spec.rb
│ ├── defines
│ ├── fixtures
│ │ ├── manifests
│ │ │ └── site.pp
│ │ └── modules
│ │ ├── mysql
│ │ │ ├── lib -> ../../../../../mysql/lib
│ │ │ ├── manifests -> ../../../../../mysql/manifests
│ │ │ └── templates -> ../../../../../mysql/templates
│ │ ├── mysqlmodule
│ │ │ ├── manifests -> ../../../../manifests
│ │ │ └── templates -> ../../../../templates
│ │ ├── staging
│ │ │ ├── files -> ../../../../../staging/files
│ │ │ ├── libs -> ../../../../../staging/libs
│ │ │ └── manifests -> ../../../../../staging/manifests
│ │ └── stdlib
│ │ ├── lib -> ../../../../../stdlib/lib
│ │ ├── manifests -> ../../../../../stdlib/manifests
│ │ └── types -> ../../../../../stdlib/types
│ ├── functions
│ ├── hosts
│ └── spec_helper.rb
└── templates
You’ll notice that in this module the user has made use of PuppetForge modules for MySQL, which in itself has other dependencies on Staging and StdLib. For RSpec to work these fixtures need to be available during the test to enable checking of your own modules code. For example;
it { is_expected.to contain_class_mysql__db(‘mydb’) }
This would look for mysql::db{‘mydb’:} in your code.
Since the .fixture.yml is not being read at the moment, you should manually add the dependencies to your
spec/fixtures/modules directory. Let’s take the MySQL module.
In our modules directory, that is where we would see mysqlmodule if listed, we would ensure that we have done a puppet module install of those modules require, and making sure we note the dependencies that have been downloaded too.
Here is the layout of the MySQL puppetlabs/mysql module;
mysql
├── CHANGELOG.md
├── checksums.json
├── CONTRIBUTING.md
├── examples/
├── Gemfile
├── lib/
├── LICENSE
├── manifests/
├── metadata.json
├── NOTICE
├── Rakefile
├── README.md
├── spec/
├── templates/
└── TODO
In our fixtures directory under modules we will create a directory called mysql and within that directory you will create symlinks back to the essential directories and files that make up the module. In this case we will symlink to;
- lib
- manifests
- templates
We would then do the same for the other 2 dependent modules stdlib and staging to ensure that our tests will work with all elements.
Overcoming variable issues
When running rspec after configuring your module dependencies, you may then find that your test still fails. Right near the top of the output you might see something like;
F
Failures:
1) mysqlmodule should contain File_line[/etc/my.cnf] with bind-address => "0.0.0.0"
Failure/Error: it {is_expected.to contain_file_line('/etc/my.cnf').with('bind-address' => '0.0.0.0')}
Puppet::PreformattedError:
Evaluation Error: Unknown variable: '::osfamily'. at /home/steve/web/puppet/modules/mysqlmodule/spec/fixtures/modules/mysql/manifests/params.pp:36:8 on node tpslaptop
From this output we are interested in the line that comes after Puppet::PreformatedError which states that the variable ::osfamily is missing. This is actually a Puppet Facter variable, and would normally be collected by the Puppet Master during the compilation of the Puppet catalog. We therefore need to define all of the values for the Facts in our classes spec test.
Our spec test file is called mysqltest_spec.rb in spec/classes, and originally looked like;
require 'spec_helper'
describe 'mysqlmodule' do
it {is_expected.to contain_file_line('/etc/my.cnf').with('bind-address' => '0.0.0.0')}
end
The test is using the file_line type from the mysql module, and we need to tell our test to set the osfamily facter variable before this is run. The change to the code that will allow the variable to be set is;
let(:facts) do
{ :osfamily => RedHat}
end
This piece of code is added within the describe block before the tests, and we have provided a value.
We would need to add each variable into the block as they appear during our tests. For example, the next one to pop up would be ::operatingsystem, so we would have the following code;
require 'spec_helper'
describe 'mysqlmodule' do
let(:facts) do
{
:osfamily => 'RedHat' ,
:operatingsystem => 'RedHat'
}
end
it {is_expected.to contain_file_line('/etc/my.cnf').with('bind-address' => '0.0.0.0')}
end
After running through the test we eventually find that to test the file_line type for the MySQL module we would need the following;
describe 'mysqlmodule' do
let(:facts) do
{ :osfamily => 'RedHat',
:operatingsystemmajrelease => '7.2',
:root_home => '',
:puppetversion => '4.10.0',
:operatingsystem => 'RedHat' }
end
it {is_expected.to contain_file_line('Edit my.cnf')}
end
This will finally result in your module being checked, or at least the file_line type;
.
Finished in 2.24 seconds (files took 0.93215 seconds to load)
1 example, 0 failures
Now you repeat for the other modules.
