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openQA starter guide

Table of Contents

Introduction

openQA is an automated test tool that makes it possible to test the whole installation process of an operating system. It uses virtual machines to reproduce the process, check the output (both serial console and screen) in every step and send the necessary keystrokes and commands to proceed to the next. openQA can check whether the system can be installed, whether it works properly in ‘live’ mode, whether applications work or whether the system responds as expected to different installation options and commands.

Even more importantly, openQA can run several combinations of tests for every revision of the operating system, reporting the errors detected for each combination of hardware configuration, installation options and variant of the operating system.

openQA is free software released under the GPLv2 license. The source code and documentation are hosted in the os-autoinst organization on GitHub.

This document describes the general operation and usage of openQA. The main goal is to provide a general overview of the tool, with all the information needed to become a happy user. More advanced topics like installation, administration or development of new tests are covered by further documents available in the official repository.

Basic concepts

Jobs

One of the most important features of openQA is that it can be used to test several combinations of actions and configurations. For every one of those combinations, the system creates a virtual machine, performs certain steps and returns an overall result. Every one of those executions is called a job. Every job is labeled with a numeric identifier and has several associated settings that will drive its behavior.

A job goes through several states:

  • scheduled Initial state for recently created jobs. Queued for future execution.

  • running In progress.

  • cancelled The job was explicitly cancelled by the user or was replaced by a clone (see below).

  • waiting The job is in ‘interactive mode’ (see below) and waiting for input.

  • done Execution finished.

Jobs in state done have typically gone through a whole sequence of steps (called testmodules) each one with its own result. But in addition to those partial results, a finished job also provides an overall result from the following list.

  • none For jobs that have not reached the done state.

  • passed No critical check failed during the process. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all testmodules where successful or that no single assertion failed.

  • failed At least one assertion considered to be critical was not satisfied at some point.

  • incomplete The job is no longer running but no result was provided. Either it was cancelled while running either it crashed.

Sometimes, the reason of a failure is not an error in the tested operating system itself, but an outdated test or a problem in the execution of the job for some external reason. In those situations, it makes sense to re-run a given job from the beginning once the problem is fixed or the tests have been updated. This is done by means of cloning. Every job can be superseded by a clone which is scheduled to run with exactly the same settings as the original job. If the original job is still not in done state, it’s cancelled immediately. From that point in time, the clone becomes the current version and the original job is considered outdated (and can be filtered in the listing) but its information and results (if any) are kept for future reference.

Needles

One of the main mechanisms for openQA to know the state of the virtual machine is checking the presence of some elements in the machine’s ‘screen’. This is performed using fuzzy image matching between the screen and the so called needles. A needle specifies both the elements to search for and a list of tags used to decide which needles should be used at any moment.

A needle consists of a full screenshot in PNG format and a json file with the same name (e.g. foo.png and foo.json) containing the associated data, like which areas inside the full screenshot are relevant or the mentioned list of tags.

{
   "area" : [
      {
         "xpos" : INTEGER,
         "ypos" : INTEGER,
         "width" : INTEGER,
         "height" : INTEGER,
         "type" : ( "match" | "ocr" | "exclude" ),
         "match" : INTEGER, // 0-100. similarity percentage
      },
      ...
   ],
   "tags" : [
      STRING, ...
   ]
}

Interactive mode

There are several points in time during the execution of a job at which openQA tries to match the screen with the available needles, reacting to the result of that check. If the job is running in interactive mode it will stop the execution at that point, freezing the virtual machine and waiting for user input before proceeding. At that moment, the user can modify the existing needles or can create a new one using as a starting point either the current screen of the virtual machine or one of the existing needles. Once the needles are adjusted, the user can command the job to reload the list of needles and continue with the execution.

The interactive mode is specially useful when creating needles for a new operating system or when the look & feel have changed and several needles need to be adjusted accordingly.

Architecture: openQA and os-autoinst

Although the project as a whole is referred to as openQA, there are in fact two different components that are hosted in separate repositories and are available as two different packages, as shown in the following figure.

openQA architecture
Figure 1. openQA architecture

The base of the system is a standalone application called os-autoinst. In each execution, this application creates a virtual machine and uses it to run the tests located in a certain directory, generating a video, screenshots and a JSON file with detailed results. In its first stage, os-autoinst reads several configuration variables that have an influence on the configuration of the machine, the exact behavior of the tests and the set of needles used in every check.

The rest of the infrastructure is located in the openQA package, which main component is the server that offers two interfaces: a web-based one for human beings and a JSON based REST-like API. That server -in light gray in the figure- relies on a SQLite database to store the list of jobs and all the associated information.

The openQA package also includes some smaller components that make use of the REST-like API for several tasks. The most important one is the worker. An openQA worker is a small piece of software that runs a continuous loop. In each iteration it asks the server for the next job to execute, places all the related information in a pool directory and calls os-autoinst with the proper configuration values. Then os-autoinst uses the pool directory to read and write all the relevant information and results. When os-autoinst finishes its execution, the worker reports the result back to the server. In fact, during the execution of os-autoinst the worker is not idle, since it keeps constantly querying the server for commands (like ‘cancel execution’ or ‘go into interactive mode’) that are partially processed by the worker itself and partially forwarded to the underlying instance of os-autoinst.

Obviously, every instance of openQA hosts several workers, every one with its own pool directory. They can be run manually or managed using systemd. The only limit to the number of workers is the one defined by the free resources of the host machine.

Access management

Some actions in openQA require special privileges. openQA provides authentication through openID. By default, openQA is configured to use the openSUSE openID provider, but it can very easily be configured to use any other valid provider. Every time a new user logs into an instance, a new user profile is created. That profile only contains the openID identity and two flags used for access control:

  • operator Means that the user is able to manage jobs, performing actions like creating new jobs, cancelling them, etc.

  • admin Means that the user is able to manage users (granting or revoking operator and admin rights) as well as job templates and other related information (see the the corresponding section).

Many of the operations in an openQA instance are not performed through the web interface but using the REST-like API. The most obvious examples are the workers and the scripts that fetch new versions of the operating system and schedule the corresponding tests. Those clients must be authorized by an operator using an API key with an associated shared secret.

For that purpose, users with the operator flag have access in the web interface to a page that allows them to manage as many API keys as they may need. For every key, a secret is automatically generated. The user can then configure the workers or any other client application to use whatever pair of API key and secret owned by him. Any client to the REST-like API using one of those API keys will be considered to be acting on behalf of the associated user. So the API key not only has to be correct and valid (not expired), it also has to belong to a user with operator rights.

For more insights about authentication, authorization and the technical details of the openQA security model, refer to the detailed blog post about the subject by the openQA development team.

Using job templates to automate jobs creation

The problem

When testing an operating system, specially when doing continuous testing, there is always a certain combination of jobs, each one with its own settings, that needs to be run for every revision. Those combinations can be different for different ‘flavors’ of the same revision, like running a different set of jobs for each architecture or for the Full and the Lite versions. This combinational problem can go one step further if openQA is being used for different kinds of tests, like running some simple pre-integration tests for some snapshots combined with more comprehensive post-integration tests for release candidates.

This section describes how an instance of openQA can be configured using the options in the admin area to automatically create all the required jobs for each revision of your operating system that needs to be tested. If you are starting from scratch, you should probably go through the following order:

  1. Define machines in Machines menu

  2. Define products you have in Products menu

  3. Specify various collections of tests you want to run in the Test suites menu

  4. Go to the template matrix in Job templates menu and decide what combinations do make sense and need to be tested

In openQA we can parametrize a test to describe for what product it will run and for what kind of machines it will be executed. For example, a test like KDE can be run for any product that has KDE installed, and can be tested in x86-64 and i586 machines. If we write this as a triples, we can create a list like this to characterize KDE tests:

(Product,             Test Suite, Machine)
(openSUSE-DVD-x86_64, KDE,        64bit)
(openSUSE-DVD-x86_64, KDE,        Laptop-64bit)
(openSUSE-DVD-x86_64, KDE,        USBBoot-64bit)
(openSUSE-DVD-i586,   KDE,        32bit)
(openSUSE-DVD-i586,   KDE,        Laptop-32bit)
(openSUSE-DVD-x86_64, KDE,        USBBoot-32bit)
(openSUSE-DVD-i586,   KDE,        64bit)
(openSUSE-DVD-i586,   KDE,        Laptop-64bit)
(openSUSE-DVD-x86_64, KDE,        USBBoot-64bit)

For every triplet, we need to configure a different instance of os-autoinst with a different set of parameters.

Products

A product in openQA is a simple description without any concrete meaning. It basically consists of a name and a set of variables that define or characterize this product in os-autoinst.

For example, the product openSUSE-DVD-x86_64 requires the variables ISO_MAXSIZE and DVD to be set up.

The list of variables is dynamic. The semantic of a variable is defined by the tests using it. Some usual variables are:

  • ISO_MAXSIZE contains the maximum size of the product. There is a test that checks that the current size of the product is less or equal than this variable.

  • DVD if it is set to 1, this indicates that the medium is a DVD.

  • LIVECD if it is set to 1, this indicates that the medium is a live image (can be a CD or USB)

  • GNOME this variable, if it is set to 1, indicates that it is a GNOME only distribution.

  • PROMO marks the promotional product.

  • RESCUECD is set to 1 for rescue CD images.

Test Suites

This is the form where we define the different tests that we created for openQA. A test consists of a name, a priority (used in the scheduler to choose the next job) and a set of variables that are used inside this particular test.

Again, the list of variables is not complete, because they are test-dependent, but some of the usual ones are:

  • BTRFS if set, the file system will be BtrFS.

  • DESKTOP possible values are kde gnome lxde xfce or textmode. Used to indicate the desktop selected by the user during the test.

  • DOCRUN used for documentation tests.

  • DUALBOOT dual boot testing, needs HDD_1 and HDDVERSION.

  • ENCRYPT encrypt the home directory via YaST.

  • HDDMODEL variable to set the HDD hardware model.

  • HDDSIZEGB hard disk size in GB. Used together with BtrFS variable.

  • HDDVERSION used together with HDD_1 to set the operating system previously installed on the hard disk.

  • HDD_1 path for the pre-created hard disk.

  • INSTALLONLY only basic installation.

  • INSTLANG installation language. Actually used only in documentation tests.

  • LIVETEST the test is on a live medium, do not install the distribution.

  • LVM select LVM volume manager.

  • NICEVIDEO used for rendering a result video for use in show rooms, skipping ugly and boring tests.

  • NOAUTOLOGIN unmark autologin in YaST

  • NUMDISKS total number of disks in QEMU.

  • QEMUVGA parameter to declare the video hardware configuration in QEMU.

  • RAIDLEVEL RAID configuration variable

  • REBOOTAFTERINSTALL if set to 1, will reboot after the installation.

  • SCREENSHOTINTERVAL used with NICEVIDEO to improve the video quality.

  • SPLITUSR a YaST configuration option.

  • TOGGLEHOME a YaST configuration option.

  • UPGRADE upgrade testing, need HDD_1 and HDDVERSION.

  • VIDEOMODE if the value is text, the installation will be done in text mode.

Machines

You need to have at least one machine set up to be able to run any tests. Those machines represent virtual machine types that you want to test. To make tests actually happen, you have to have an openQA worker connected that can fulfill those specifications.

  • Name. User defined string - only needed for operator to identify the machine configuration.

  • Backend. What backend should be used for this machine. Recommended value is qemu as it is the most tested one, but other options (such as kvm2usb or vbox) are also possible.

  • Variables Variables represent a way how to influence backend behaviour. Few important examples:

    • QEMUCPU can be qemu32 or qemu64 and specifies the architecture of the virtual CPU.

    • QEMUCPUS is an integer that specifies the number of cores you wish for.

    • LAPTOP if set to 1, QEMU will create a laptop profile.

    • USBBOOT when set to 1, the image will be loaded through an emulated USB stick.

    • SMP enables smp when set to 1, disables when set to 0.

Testing openSUSE

Easiest way to start using openQA is to start testing openSUSE as we have everything setup and prepared to ease the initial deployment. If you want to play deeper, you can configure the whole openQA manually from scratch, but this document should help you to get started faster.

Getting tests

First you need to get actual tests. You can get openSUSE tests and needles (the expected results) from GitHub. It belongs into the /var/lib/os-autoinst/tests directory. To make it easier, you can just run

/usr/lib/os-autoinst/tools/fetchneedles

Which will download the tests to the correct location and will set the correct rights as well.

Getting openQA configuration

To get everything configured to actually run the tests, there are plenty of options to set in the admin interface. If you plan to test openSUSE Factory, using tests mentioned in the previous section, the easiest way to get started is the following command:

/var/lib/os-autoinst/tests/opensuse/templates

This will load some default settings that were used at some point of time in openSUSE production openQA. Therefore those should work reasonably well with openSUSE tests and needles.

Adding a new iso to test

To start testing a new ISO put it in /var/lib/openqa/factory/iso and call the following commands:

# Run the first test
/usr/share/openqa/script/client isos post \
         ISO=openSUSE-Factory-NET-x86_64-Build0053-Media.iso \
         DISTRI=opensuse \
         VERSION=Factory \
         FLAVOR=NET \
         ARCH=x86_64 \
         BUILD=0053

If your openQA is not running on port 80 on localhost, you can add option --host=http://otherhost:9526 to specify a different port or host.

Warning
 Using only iso name in client command and saving it in /var/lib/openqa/factory/iso is recommended as is using Factory isos. ISOs are not uploaded from the path that you would specify.

Pitfalls

take a look at Documented Pitfalls