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Continuous Integration

IXP Manager grew out of a code base and schema that started in the early '90s. Long before test driven development or behaviour driven development was fashionable for PHP. However, as IXP Manager is taking over more and more critical configuration tasks, we continue to back fill some automated testing with continuous integration for critical elements.

We use GitHub Actions for continuous integration which is provided free for public repositories.

Our current build status is: Build Status

The CI system runs the full suite of tests every time a commit is pushed to GitHub. As such, any build failing states are usually transitory. Official IXP Manager releases are only made when all tests pass.

We use two types of unit tests:

  1. PHP Unit for standard unit tests;
  2. Laravel Dusk for browser based tests.

We won't be aggressively writing tests for the existing codebase but will add tests as appropriate as we continue development. What follows is some basic instructions on how to set up tests and an overview (or links) to some of the tests we have implemented.

DISCLAIMER: This is not a tutorial on unit testing, phpunit, Laravel Dusk or anything else. If you have no experience with these tools, please read up on them elsewhere first.

Setting Up PHPUnit Tests

Documentation by real example can be found via the GitHub Actions workflow files and the CI data directory which contains scripts, database dumps and configurations.

Testing assumes a known good sample database which contains a small mix of customers with different configuration options. The files generated from this database are tested against known good configuration files. You first need to create a database, add a database user, import this testing database and then configure a .env file for testing (see the one here use here).

In MySQL:

CREATE DATABASE ixp_ci CHARACTER SET = 'utf8mb4' COLLATE = 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci';
GRANT ALL ON `ixp_ci`.* TO `ixp_ci`@`localhost` IDENTIFIED BY 'somepassword';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Then import the sample database:

cat data/ci/ci_test_db.sql.bz2  | mysql -h localhost -u ixp_ci -psomepassword ixp_ci

Now, create your .env for testing, such as:

DB_HOST=localhost
DB_DATABASE=ixp_ci
DB_USERNAME=ixp_ci
DB_PASSWORD=somepassword

Note that the phpunit.xml file in the root directory has some default settings matching the test database. You should not need to edit these.

Setting Up Laravel Dusk

Please review the official documentation here.

You need to ensure the development packages for IXP Manager are installed via:

# move to the root directory of IXP Manager
cd $IXPROOT
composer install --dev

You need to set the APP_URL environment variable in your .env file. This value should match the URL you use to access your application in a browser.

Test Database Notes

  1. The SUPERADMIN username / password is one-way hashed using bcrypt. If you want to log into the frontend of the test database, these details are: travis / travisci.
  2. There are two test CUSTADMIN accounts which can be accessed using username / password: hecustadmin / travisci and imcustadmin / travisci.
  3. There are two test CUSTUSER accounts which can be accessed using username / password: hecustuser / travisci and imcustuser / travisci.

Running Tests

In one console session, start the artisan / Laravel web server:

# move to the root directory of IXP Manager
cd $IXPROOT
php artisan serve

And then kick off all the tests which includes PHPUnit and Laravel Dusk tests, run:

./vendor/bin/phpunit

Sample output:

PHPUnit 7.2.2 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.

...............................................................  63 / 144 ( 43%)
............................................................... 126 / 144 ( 87%)
..................                                              144 / 144 (100%)

Time: 1.86 minutes, Memory: 103.73MB

If you only want to run Laravel Dusk / browser tests, run the following (shown with sample output):

$ php artisan dusk
PHPUnit 6.5.8 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.

..                                                                  2 / 2 (100%)

Time: 12.73 seconds, Memory: 24.00MB

If you want to exclude the browser based tests, just exclude that directory as follows:

$ ./vendor/bin/phpunit --filter '/^((?!Tests\\Browser).)*$/'
PHPUnit 7.2.2 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.

...............................................................  63 / 142 ( 44%)
............................................................... 126 / 142 ( 88%)
................                                                142 / 142 (100%)

Time: 1.59 minutes, Memory: 106.41MB

You can also limit tests to specific test suites:

$ ./vendor/bin/phpunit --testsuite 'Dusk / Browser Test Suite'
$ ./vendor/bin/phpunit --testsuite 'Docstore Test Suite'
$ ./vendor/bin/phpunit --testsuite 'IXP Manager Test Suite'

Last update: September 20, 2021