One to read: Testing Ansible roles with Molecule

One to read: “Testing Ansible roles with Molecule”

This is a good brief summary of Molecule – the default testing product for Ansible (it’s now a product that the Ansible project maintains). This post also makes reference to TestInfra which is another project I need to look in to.

TestInfra really is the more interesting piece (although Molecule is interesting too), because it’s how you check exactly what is on a host. Here’s an example snippet of code (from the front page of that site’s documentation):

def test_passwd_file(host):
    passwd = host.file("/etc/passwd")
    assert passwd.contains("root")
    assert passwd.user == "root"
    assert passwd.group == "root"
    assert passwd.mode == 0o644


def test_nginx_is_installed(host):
    nginx = host.package("nginx")
    assert nginx.is_installed
    assert nginx.version.startswith("1.2")


def test_nginx_running_and_enabled(host):
    nginx = host.service("nginx")
    assert nginx.is_running
    assert nginx.is_enabled

See how easily this clearly defines what your server should look like – it’s got a file called /etc/passwd owned by root with specific permissions, and that the file contains the word root in it, likewise there is a package called nginx installed at version 1.2 and also it’s running and enabled… all good stuff, particularly from an infrastructure-as-code perspective. Now, I just need to go away and test this stuff with more diverse backgrounds than just a stock Ubuntu machine :)