Unit Testing puppet code

Abstract:

Testing tools for our configuration management tooling lags behind testing for our application code. Application testers can talk about the testing pyramid, where a large number of fast, specific, unit-level tests are at the base, supporting a much smaller number of higher-level end-to-end tests which may integrate with external components. But typically for configuration management tools, and particularly Puppet, the tooling does not allow us to write fast, unit-level tests; every test is an end-to-end test, even if it only makes unit-level assertions.

In this ignite talk, I will present fizzgig, a new library for writing unit tests in Puppet. This brings a number of benefits to testing configuration management that application tests already have: removing fixtures in preference of keeping all test data within the test; faster performance; tests which fail for a specific reason thus aiding debugging. I will give examples of puppet modules where good unit tests would have helped improve quality.

Speaker:

Philip Potter, consultant, ThoughtWorks

Philip is a consultant software developer for ThoughtWorks. Currently he is working on the GOV.UK project infrastructure team. He is also an organizer for the London Clojure Community.