Tutorial: Testing Akkeris Apps with TaaS

This tutorial will walk you through the process of testing an app with Taas.

We will create a test suite, configure a new Taas test, and trigger that test.

Prerequisites

Akkeris App

To keep the scope of this tutorial focused on Taas, we're going to assume that you have a running Akkeris app that responds to HTTP requests. If you are unsure on how to do this, see the main Akkeris docs for help.

Akkeris CLI

The Akkeris CLI must be installed on your machine. Install Node.js and npm, then run:

$ npm install -g akkeris

Akkeris CLI Taas Plugin

Install the Taas plugin for the CLI:

$ aka plugins:install taas

Create Test Suite

Let's create a simple test suite to test our Akkeris app. You can either follow along below, or just clone the code from the Github repo and skip to Deploy to Akkeris.

Test Suite Structure

Create a new directory with the following files in it:

index.js

This is the guts of our test suite. Essentially, it attempts to get an HTTP reponse from a URL. If the status is OK (e.g. 200), it returns 0. If it's not OK (e.g. 401), it returns 1. Pretty simple!

// Easy to use HTTP request library
const axios = require('axios');

// Get URL to target from an environment variable, using Google as a fallback
const targetURL = process.env.TARGET_URL || "https://google.com/"

async function test() {
  try {
    console.log(`Testing ${targetURL}...`)
    // Make an HTTP request to the target URL
    await axios.get(targetURL);
    console.log("Test passed!")
    // If we reach this point, we got an OK response and can return 0 (success)
    process.exit(0)
  } catch (err) {
    // The status of the response was not in the OK range (200).
    if (err.response && err.response.status && (err.response.status < 200 || err.response.status > 299)) {
      console.log(`Response code out of expected range: ${err.response.status}`)
    // Something else bad happened...
    } else {
      console.log(err.message)
    }
    console.log('Test failed!')
    // If we reach this point, we did not get an OK response and need to return 1 (failure)
    process.exit(1)
  }
}

// Sleep for 5 minutes if PORT is set
// This will allow the Akkeris release to be successful
if (process.env.PORT) {
  setTimeout(() => console.log('Sleepy'), 300000)
}

// If FAIL is set, immediately fail. 
// This is useful for testing.
if (process.env.FAIL) {
  process.exit(1);
}

test();

package.json

This file lists our app's npm dependencies.

{
  "name": "simple-app",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node index.js"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "axios": "^0.19.0"
  }
}

Dockerfile

This file provides instructions to Docker on how to build our app into an image.

FROM node:12-alpine
WORKDIR /src/app
COPY index.js package.json /src/app/
RUN npm install
CMD ["npm", "start"]

.gitignore

This will make sure we don't check any dependency runtime files into our Git repo.

node_modules

Deploy to Akkeris

Now we need to deploy our test suite as an Akkeris app. There's a few ways to do this, but the easiest for our purposes is to create a new Github repository and link it to a new Akkeris app.

Create Git Repository

Create a new repository on Github, then initialize and add the project's structure to an local repo. Then, push it to Github.

(If you cloned the sample code, first run $ rm -rf .git in the code directory)

git init
git remote add origin https://github.com/ORG/REPO
git add Dockerfile index.js package.json
git commit -m "first commit"
git push -u origin master

Now, create an access token so Akkeris can access it (optional if admin user is authorized in the repo):

• Go to https://github.com/settings/tokens/new
• Fill out the form, making sure to select the repo and admin:repo_hook settings. Then select "Generate Token"
• Copy the new token and save it for later use

Create and Link Akkeris App

Let's use the Akkeris CLI to create a new app and link it to our Git repository.

aka apps:create simplesuite -s SPACE -o ORG -d "Simple Taas test suite for testing Akkeris apps"
aka repo:set -a simplesuite-SPACE https://github.com/ORG/REPO -u USERNAME -t TOKEN

There is an important difference here between deploying the test suite and a regular Akkeris app - we don't actually want to have any dynos running for the test suite! Wait a minute or so for the app to be released, and scale the web dyno to 0:

aka ps:scale -a simplesuite-SPACE web=0

Hooray - our test suite is ready to be used in Taas! When we make changes to our test suite in Github, it will be automatically built by Akkeris and be ready to use in the next test run.

Taas Test Setup

Now that we have our test suite up in Akkeris, let's create a Taas test:

$ akm taas:tests:register

This will prompt you for all the information that Taas needs in order to set up a new test. (See Registering Tests for more detailed information)

Proceed through the prompts, using the following table as a guide:

Your Taas test is now ready to roll!

Triggering Your Test

To kick off your test suite, run:

$ akm taas:tests:trigger tutorial-taas (replace tutorial-taas with your test name if you named it something different)

Soon the results of test will be sent to your specified slack channel!

Don't have Slack? You can use the CLI to see results:

$ akm taas:tests:runs tutorial-taas

Copy the runid. Then, you can get detailed information with one of these commands:

$ akm taas:runs:info [RUNID] - See general information about the run

$ akm taas:runs:output [RUNID] - See logs for the run

$ akm taas:runs:artifacts [RUNID] - See artifacts (screenshots, Kubernetes info) for the run

$ akm taas:runs:rerun [RUNID] - Redo the run

Further Reading

To find out how to use Taas with pipeline status checks, check out the TaaS Pipeline Status Checks Tutorial