Earlier this year, I attended ChefConf 2015 in Santa Clara where I attended the Hack Day at Microsoft on Friday. While I spent most of that day working on various projects like kitchen-rackspace with Jonathan Hartman, I also tested the upcoming test-kitchen 1.4 release upon Fletcher‘s request. Among the release notes was something I would encounter a few months later in November:
Note that this release has the much-fabled “Windows guest support.”
A few months later, in November, I received some bug reports in the Firewall cookbook related to Windows support — specifically, bad Powershell commands that weren’t applying the specified rules to the Windows Firewall. At that time, I decided to go back and really ensure we were testing the Firewall cookbook thoroughly on Windows. After a bit of Google-fu, I discovered the blog post Fletcher had written regarding Windows support released in Test-Kitchen back in April.
As it turns out, support for Windows in Test-Kitchen & Vagrant were actually quite simple to use. Just running `vagrant plugin install vagrant-winrm` on my workstation was enough for me to get started by adding a new platform to .kitchen.yml: [shell]windows-2012r2[/shell]. The hardest part was actually getting a Windows Vagrant box, and Fletcher had even already documented that quite well himself. Once I had a Windows box defined, test-kitchen converges went swimmingly on Windows.
Next, I needed to actually test these firewall commands. Back to Google to find the Serverspec documentation on Windows Support, where I found this gem:
Serverspec is now providing a limited support for Microsoft Windows.
As it turns out, enough functionality was there to do the limited testing I actually wanted to do. I had to adapt the provided spec_helper.rb example to work on both Windows and Linux guests, like so:
[ruby]
if (/cygwin|mswin|mingw|bccwin|wince|emx/ =~ RUBY_PLATFORM).nil?
set :backend, :exec
set :path, ‘/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH’
else
set :backend, :cmd
set :os, family: ‘windows’
end
# helper method to conditionally guard each test by platform
def linux?
%w(debian redhat ubuntu).include?(os[:family])
end
def windows?
%w(windows).include?(os[:family])
end
[/ruby]
After these were all in place, and removing some platform-specific environment variables like [shell]$HOME[/shell], writing tests against Windows guests was easy. And by combining those helper methods with each test, I could ensure the above test would only run when [ruby]windows?[/ruby] returns true.
[ruby]
describe file(“#{ENV[‘HOME’]}/windows-chef.rules”), if: windows? do
its(:content) { should match(%r{firewall add rule name=”prepend” description=”prepend” dir=in service=any protocol=tcp localip=any localport=7788 interfacetype=any remoteip=any remoteport=any action=allow}) }
end
[/ruby]
With all of this done, I could actually test pull requests and contributions, and be sure I didn’t break things myself, on Windows. And it has already prevented merges of broken code. Using Test-Kitchen & Serverspec with Windows guests, software testing saves the day again!