neutron/TESTING.rst

Testing Neutron

Overview

Neutron relies on different types of testing to ensure its quality, as described below. In addition to in-tree testing, Tempest is responsible for validating Neutron's integration with other OpenStack components, and Rally is responsible for benchmarking.

Unit Tests

Unit tests (neutron/test/unit/) are meant to cover as much code as possible and should be executed without the service running. They are designed to test the various pieces of the neutron tree to make sure any new changes don't break existing functionality.

Functional Tests

Functional tests (neutron/tests/functional/) are intended to validate actual system interaction. Mocks should be used sparingly, if at all. Care should be taken to ensure that existing system resources are not modified and that resources created in tests are properly cleaned up.

API Tests

API tests (neutron/tests/api/) are intended to ensure the function and stability of the Neutron API. As much as possible, changes to this path should not be made at the same time as changes to the code to limit the potential for introducing backwards-incompatible changes.

Since API tests need to be able to target a deployed Neutron daemon that is not necessarily test-managed, they should not depend on controlling the runtime configuration of the target daemon. API tests should be black-box - no assumptions should be made about implementation. Only the contract defined by Neutron's REST API should be validated, and all interaction with the daemon should be via a REST client.

Development process

It is expected that any new changes that are proposed for merge come with tests for that feature or code area. Ideally any bugs fixes that are submitted also have tests to prove that they stay fixed! In addition, before proposing for merge, all of the current tests should be passing.

Structure of the unit test tree

The structure of the unit test tree should match the structure of the code tree, e.g. :

- target module: neutron.agent.utils

- test module: neutron.tests.unit.agent.test_utils

Unit test modules should have the same path under neutron/tests/unit/ as the module they target has under neutron/, and their name should be the name of the target module prefixed by test_. This requirement is intended to make it easier for developers to find the unit tests for a given module.

Similarly, when a test module targets a package, that module's name should be the name of the package prefixed by test_ with the same path as when a test targets a module, e.g. :

- target package: neutron.ipam

- test module: neutron.tests.unit.test_ipam

The following command can be used to validate whether the unit test tree is structured according to the above requirements: :

./tools/check_unit_test_structure.sh

Where appropriate, exceptions can be added to the above script. If code is not part of the neutron namespace, for example, it's probably reasonable to exclude their unit tests from the check.

Virtual environments

Testing OpenStack projects, including Neutron, is made easier with DevStack.

Create a machine (such as a VM or Vagrant box) running a distribution supported by DevStack and install DevStack there. For example, there is a Vagrant script for DevStack at https://github.com/bcwaldon/vagrant_devstack.

Note

If you prefer not to use DevStack, you can still check out source code on your local machine and develop from there.

Running tests

There are three mechanisms for running tests: run_tests.sh, tox, and nose2. Before submitting a patch for review you should always ensure all test pass; a tox run is triggered by the jenkins gate executed on gerrit for each patch pushed for review.

With these mechanisms you can either run the tests in the standard environment or create a virtual environment to run them in.

By default after running all of the tests, any pep8 errors found in the tree will be reported.

With run_tests.sh

You can use the run_tests.sh script in the root source directory to execute tests in a virtualenv:

./run_tests -V

With nose2

You can use nose2 to run individual tests, as well as use for debugging portions of your code:

source .venv/bin/activate
pip install nose2
nose2

There are disadvantages to running nose2 - the tests are run sequentially, so race condition bugs will not be triggered, and the full test suite will take significantly longer than tox & testr. The upside is that testr has some rough edges when it comes to diagnosing errors and failures, and there is no easy way to set a breakpoint in the Neutron code, and enter an interactive debugging session while using testr.

It is also possible to use nose2's predecessor, nose, to run the tests:

source .venv/bin/activate
pip install nose
nosetests

nose has one additional disadvantage over nose2 - it does not understand the load_tests protocol introduced in Python 2.7. This limitation will result in errors being reported for modules that depend on load_tests (usually due to use of testscenarios).

With tox

Neutron, like other OpenStack projects, uses tox for managing the virtual environments for running test cases. It uses Testr for managing the running of the test cases.

Tox handles the creation of a series of virtualenvs that target specific versions of Python (2.6, 2.7, 3.3, etc).

Testr handles the parallel execution of series of test cases as well as the tracking of long-running tests and other things.

For more information on the standard Tox-based test infrastructure used by OpenStack and how to do some common test/debugging procedures with Testr, see this wiki page:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Testr

PEP8 and Unit Tests

Running pep8 and unit tests is as easy as executing this in the root directory of the Neutron source code:

tox

To run only pep8:

tox -e pep8

Since pep8 includes running pylint on all files, it can take quite some time to run. To restrict the pylint check to only the files altered by the latest patch changes:

tox -e pep8 HEAD~1

To run only the unit tests:

tox -e py27

Functional Tests

To run functional tests that do not require sudo privileges or specific-system dependencies:

tox -e functional

To run all the functional tests, including those requiring sudo privileges and system-specific dependencies, the procedure defined by tools/configure_for_func_testing.sh should be followed.

IMPORTANT: configure_for_func_testing.sh relies on devstack to perform extensive modification to the underlying host. Execution of the script requires sudo privileges and it is recommended that the following commands be invoked only on a clean and disposeable VM. A VM that has had devstack previously installed on it is also fine. :

git clone https://git.openstack.org/openstack-dev/devstack ../devstack
./tools/configure_for_func_testing.sh ../devstack -i
tox -e dsvm-functional

The '-i' option is optional and instructs the script to use devstack to install and configure all of Neutron's package dependencies. It is not necessary to provide this option if devstack has already been used to deploy Neutron to the target host.

Fullstack Tests

To run all the full-stack tests, you may use: :

tox -e dsvm-fullstack

Since full-stack tests often require the same resources and dependencies as the functional tests, using the configuration script tools/configure_for_func_testing.sh is advised (as described above). When running full-stack tests on a clean VM for the first time, we advise to run ./stack.sh successfully to make sure all Neutron's dependencies are met. Also note that in order to preserve resources on the gate, running the dsvm-functional suite will also run all full-stack tests (and a new worker won't be assigned specifically for dsvm-fullstack).

API Tests

To run the api tests, deploy tempest and neutron with devstack and then run the following command: :

tox -e api

If tempest.conf cannot be found at the default location used by devstack (/opt/stack/tempest/etc) it may be necessary to set TEMPEST_CONFIG_DIR before invoking tox: :

export TEMPEST_CONFIG_DIR=[path to dir containing tempest.conf]
tox -e api

Running individual tests

For running individual test modules or cases, you just need to pass the dot-separated path to the module you want as an argument to it.

For executing a specific test case, specify the name of the test case class separating it from the module path with a colon.

For example, the following would run only the JSONV2TestCase tests from neutron/tests/unit/test_api_v2.py:

$ ./run_tests.sh neutron.tests.unit.test_api_v2.JSONV2TestCase

or:

$ tox -e py27 neutron.tests.unit.test_api_v2.JSONV2TestCase

Adding more tests

Neutron has a fast growing code base and there is plenty of areas that need to be covered by unit and functional tests.

To get a grasp of the areas where tests are needed, you can check current coverage by running:

$ ./run_tests.sh -c

Debugging

By default, calls to pdb.set_trace() will be ignored when tests are run. For pdb statements to work, invoke run_tests as follows:

$ ./run_tests.sh -d [test module path]

It's possible to debug tests in a tox environment:

$ tox -e venv -- python -m testtools.run [test module path]

Tox-created virtual environments (venv's) can also be activated after a tox run and reused for debugging:

$ tox -e venv
$ . .tox/venv/bin/activate
$ python -m testtools.run [test module path]

Tox packages and installs the neutron source tree in a given venv on every invocation, but if modifications need to be made between invocation (e.g. adding more pdb statements), it is recommended that the source tree be installed in the venv in editable mode:

# run this only after activating the venv
$ pip install --editable .

Editable mode ensures that changes made to the source tree are automatically reflected in the venv, and that such changes are not overwritten during the next tox run.

Post-mortem debugging

Setting OS_POST_MORTEM_DEBUGGER in the shell environment will ensure that the debugger .post_mortem() method will be invoked on test failure:

$ OS_POST_MORTEM_DEBUGGER=pdb ./run_tests.sh -d [test module path]

Supported debuggers are pdb, and pudb. Pudb is full-screen, console-based visual debugger for Python which let you inspect variables, the stack, and breakpoints in a very visual way, keeping a high degree of compatibility with pdb:

$ ./.venv/bin/pip install pudb

$ OS_POST_MORTEM_DEBUGGER=pudb ./run_tests.sh -d [test module path]

References