In one of the previous blog posts (This one) I described how you can test your Ansible roles with Test Kitchen and Serverspec. With this setup we were able to execute an Ansible Role in an docker container and validate this installation with Serverspec. Server spec is a little bit limited, as we only tested the installation in an sort of technical way: Process is running, port is open, file is created and owner by user x etc. Sometimes this isn’t enough to validate your setup, BATS is the answer.

“Bats is a TAP-compliant testing framework for Bash. It provides a simple way to verify that the UNIX programs you write behave as expected.

A Bats test file is a Bash script with special syntax for defining test cases. Under the hood, each test case is just a function with a description.”

#!/usr/bin/env bats

@test "Validate status code for login page" {
  run curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" http://zabbix.example.com/index.php
  [[ $output = "200" ]]
}

First we let the script now this is an bats script. The 2nd line is the start of an test and this line starts with the @ sign. Each test has an description and in this case: Validate status code for login page.  Next line is the actual test, we run the curl command. The command needs to start with run, so it will know that an actual command should be executed. In this case, the output of the curl command is the http status code and this will be checked in the 4th line. The $output variable contains the output of the command and in this case, it will contain 200 (or something else, but then the test fails.)

We can also do an check to find if some string is found in the output of the test command, see the following example:

@test "Validate login page and search for \"Username\"" {
  run curl -s http://zabbix.example.com/index.php
  [[ $output =~ ">Username<" ]]
}

With this test, we do an curl of an page and checks if we can find the string “>Username<“ in the output. If this is found, this test is executed correctly, otherwise it will fail.

Just to be clear, you don’t have to use this output check for each check. You can also rely on the exit codes of the command. See this paragraph:

“Test cases consist of standard shell commands. Bats makes use of Bash’s errexit (set -e) option when running test cases. If every command in the test case exits with a 0 status code (success), the test passes. In this way, each line is an assertion of truth.”

(Source: https://github.com/sstephenson/bats)

Please check the github page, there are some nice examples on how to write your tests. But the goal for this blog post is that we have to use it with our Test Kitchen setup, so how do we continue?

As you might recall from the earlier mentioned blog post, we created the directory structure: test/integrations/default. And in this directory we created an directory named serverspec. In this “default” directory we also create an directory named bats. After this we create the file with the extension .bats.

Now we are all set. 😃Now we can execute “kitchen test” and when the Ansible role is installed, the bats suits will begin:

-----> Running bats test suite
        ✓ Validate status code for login page
        ✓ Validate login page and search for "Username"
        ✓ Validate if we can login with default credentials via API

Above example shows 3 tests and each test is executed correctly, as you can see with the checks in front of it. (Otherwise we would see an ‘x’) Right after this, the server spec will be executed.

Have fun! 😃