Puppet Labs Spec Helper

The Short Version

This repository is meant to provide a single source of truth for how to initialize different Puppet versions for spec testing.

The common use case is a module such as stdlib that works with many versions of Puppet. The stdlib module should require the spec helper in this repository, which will in turn automatically figure out the version of Puppet being tested against and perform version specific initialization.

Other "customers" that should use this module are:

• Facter
• PuppetDB
• Mount Providers

Usage

When developing or testing modules, simply clone this repository and install the gem it contains.

$ git clone git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs_spec_helper.git
$ cd puppetlabs_spec_helper
$ rake package:gem
$ gem install pkg/puppetlabs_spec_helper-*.gem

Add this to your project's spec_helper.rb:

require 'rubygems'
require 'puppetlabs_spec_helper/module_spec_helper'

Add this to your project's Rakefile:

require 'rubygems'
require 'puppetlabs_spec_helper/rake_tasks'

And run the spec tests:

$ cd $modulename
$ rake spec

Issues

Please file issues against this project at the Puppet Labs Issue Tracker

The Long Version

Purpose of this Project

This project is intended to serve two purposes:

1. To serve as a bridge between external projects and multiple versions of puppet; in other words, if your project has a dependency on puppet, you shouldn't need to need to worry about the details of how to initialize puppet's state for testing, no matter what version of puppet you are testing against.
2. To provide some convenience classes / methods for doing things like creating tempfiles, common rspec matchers, etc. These classes are in the puppetlabs_spec directory.
3. To provide a common set of Rake tasks so that the procedure for testing modules is unified.

To Use this Project

The most common usage scenario is that you will check out the 'master' branch of this project from github, and install it as a rubygem. There should be few or no cases where you would want to have any other branch of this project besides master/HEAD.

Initializing Puppet for Testing

In most cases, your project should be able to define a spec_helper.rb that includes just this one simple line:

require 'puppetlabs_spec_helper/puppet_spec_helper'

Then, as long as the gem is installed, you should be all set.

If you are using rspec-puppet for module testing, you will want to include a different library:

require 'puppetlabs_spec_helper/module_spec_helper'

NOTE that this is specifically for initializing Puppet's core. If your project does not have any dependencies on puppet and you just want to use the utility classes, see the next section.

Using Utility Classes

If you'd like to use the Utility classes (PuppetlabsSpec::Files, PuppetlabsSpec::Fixtures), you just need to add this to your project's spec_helper.rb:

require 'puppetlabs_spec_helper/puppetlabs_spec_helper'

NOTE that the above line happens automatically if you've required 'puppetlabs_spec_helper/puppet_spec_helper', so you don't need to do both.

In either case, you'll have all of the functionality of Puppetlabs::Files, Puppetlabs::Fixtures, etc., mixed-in to your rspec context.

Testing Parser Functions

This library provides a consistent way to create a Puppet::Parser::Scope object suitable for use in a testing harness with the intent of testing the expected behavior of parser functions distributed in modules.

Previously, modules would do something like this:

describe "split()" do
  let(:scope) { Puppet::Parser::Scope.new }
  it "should split 'one;two' on ';' into [ 'one', 'two' ]" do
    scope.function_split(['one;two', ';']).should == [ 'one', 'two' ]
  end
end

This will not work beyond Puppet 2.7 as we have changed the behavior of the scope initializer in Puppet 3.0. Modules should instead initialize scope instances in a manner decoupled from the internal behavior of Puppet:

require 'puppetlabs_spec_helper/puppetlabs_spec/puppet_internals'
describe "split()" do
  let(:scope) { PuppetlabsSpec::PuppetInternals.scope }
  it "should split 'one;two' on ';' into [ 'one', 'two' ]" do
    scope.function_split(['one;two', ';']).should == [ 'one', 'two' ]
  end
end

EOF