CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unit-testingansibleyaml
Vjain
Vjain

Reputation: 43

How to create unit test cases for Ansible functionalities?

I want to add unit testing for my ansible playbook. I am new to this and have tried few things but didn't understood much. How can I start on this and write a test case properly?

Following is the simple example:

  yum: 
    name: httpd 
    state: present

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2174

Answers (1)

Zeitounator
Zeitounator

Reputation: 44760

Ansible is not a programming language but a tool that will check the state you describe is aligned with the state of the node your run in against. So you cannot unit tests your tasks. They are in a certain way tests by themselves already. The underlying ansible binary that runs those task has unit tests itself used during its development.

Your example above is asking ansible to test if httpd is present on the target machine and will return ok if this is the case, changed if it had to install the package to fulfill the requirement, or error if something went wrong.

Meanwhile, it is not because you cannot unit test your ansible code that no tests are possible at all. You can perform basic static checks with yammlint and ansible-lint. To go further, you will have to run your playbook/role/collection against a test target node.

This has become quite easy with CI that will let you spawn virtual machines or docker container from scratch and run your script to test that no error is fired, the --check option passes successfully, idempotency is obeyed (i.e. nothing should change on a second run with the same parameters), and everything works as expected (e.g. in your above case port 80 is opened and your get the default Apache web page).

You can write those kind of tests yourself (running against localhost in a test vm for example). This Mac Appstore CLI role by Geerlinguy is using such tests through travis-ci as an example.

You can also use existing tools to help you write those tests in a more structured way like molecule. Here are some example roles using it if you are interested:

[1] Note for transparency: I am the maintainer of this example repository

Upvotes: 2

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