Testing in CircleCI

Introduction

This guide is intended for XMPP Server developers who are building their server in a Circle CI. It demonstrates how to add XMPP Interoperability and Standards Conformance tests integrated into a build & test pipeline. This assumes that you already have a pipeline established, and wish to add the additional checks.

The checks run as their own action within the pipeline, in which they’ll execute tests and output junit-esque and debugging output. The only prerequisite is that you’ve got a built server and have started it.

Assuming that you have a pre-existing pipeline that build your server and starts it for integration testing, then adding our Circle CI Orb is as easy as adding one step to your pipeline, like this:

- xmpp-interop-tests/test:
    domain: shakespeare.lit
    timeout: 60000
    adminAccountUsername: juliet
    adminAccountPassword: O_Romeo_Romeo!

The above assumes that your server is running and reachable on the domain shakespeare.lit and that it is provisioned with an administrative account (one that is allowed to create other users, per XEP-0133) that uses the username juliet and the provided password. You’ll find the full range of available configuration options below.

A Full Example

Assume that you have a pre-existing build pipeline that looks like this for building your XMPP server:

description: >
  Run an interop tests step as part of an XMPP server build process

usage:
  version: 2.1

  jobs:
    build:
      docker:
        - image: cimg/base:2024.02
      steps:
        - run: echo "Build your server here"
        - persist_to_workspace:
            paths:
              - ./my-server

  workflows:
    build-my-server:
      jobs:
        - build

Here, we are hand-waving around the actual check out of the code and setting up of tooling. We do make available the server artifact as a path, to be used further down the line.

A second job that may already exist uses the build output, and launches a server to be used for integration testing.

    test:
      docker:
        - image: cimg/openjdk:17.0
      steps:
        - run:
            command: ./my-server/run.sh
            background: true
        - run:
            command: ./my-server/execute-my-tests.sh

The workflow is adjusted to run the additional test step after the build step completes:

  workflows:
    build-my-server:
      jobs:
        - build
        - test:
            requires:
              - build

We’ve added a second job to the end of the first which fetches a launch script and the freshly-built binary, runs the launch script to run the server in the background, then calls some script to run whatever tests that you already had in your project.

The above combines into a pipeline that you may already have in your project, or something that you would add in preparation of running our Interoperability Tests. It is all highly specific to your project.

To run our Interoperability Tests, only one step needs to be added to this. This step makes use of our Orb, that you’ll need to define in the top of your configuration:

  orbs:
    xmpp-interop-tests: xmpp-interop-tests/tests@1.0.0

With the Orb defined, a step that uses it can be added to your pre-existing job:

      - xmpp-interop-tests/test:
          domain: shakespeare.lit
          timeout: 60000
          adminAccountUsername: juliet
          adminAccountPassword: O_Romeo_Romeo!

This step will use our Circle CI Orb to run the XMPP Interoperability Tests against your server. Look below for additional configuration options.

For completeness, here is the full pipeline, combining everything above:

description: >
  Run an interop tests step as part of an XMPP server build process

usage:
  version: 2.1

  orbs:
    xmpp-interop-tests: xmpp-interop-tests/tests@1.0.0

  jobs:
    build:
      docker:
        - image: cimg/base:2024.02
      steps:
        - run: echo "Build your server here"
        - persist_to_workspace:
            paths:
              - ./my-server
    test:
      docker:
        - image: cimg/openjdk:17.0
      steps:
        - run:
            command: ./my-server/run.sh
            background: true
        - run:
            command: ./my-server/execute-my-tests.sh
        - xmpp-interop-tests/test:
            domain: shakespeare.lit
            timeout: 60000
            adminAccountUsername: juliet
            adminAccountPassword: O_Romeo_Romeo!

  workflows:
    build-my-server:
      jobs:
        - build
        - test:
            requires:
              - build

Configuration

Various options are available when calling xmpp_interop_tests_action, and whilst none of them are absolutely required, the defaults are unlikely to be perfect for everyone.

For the latest updates to the documentation of the configuration updates, consult the GitHub repository.

Next steps

Now that you have integrated the XMPP Interoperability and Standards Conformance tests into your build pipeline, it is time to start working with the tests!

We’ve compiled the following resources to help you with any run-time challenges that you may run into:

• Choosing what test to run - helps you choose how to disable specific tests (useful when you want to ignore a particular test for some reason).
• Diagnose test failures - explains what you can do to find the reason that test is failing. Did we identify an issue in your server software? Find out!

Splash image courtesy of Circle CI Blogs