Kowalski - distributed testing penguin on Rails

Kowalski is coded to be as hackable as possible, please look though the files and hack what you need in them for your project.

Kowalski provides:

• some capistrano tasks to setup runners for distributed testing
• a sinatra app as a frontend to those tasks

Kowalski needs:

• a user in each runner machine
• a git repo with the project
• rake tasks in the project to handle all services needed for testing (MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, ...)
• ruby and rubygems to be installed system-wide
• binary dependencies of gems to be met (should be if runner is a developer's machine)
• spork to have been setup in the project
• custom config to override the ones in the git repo (config/database.yml.kowalski and others)

Current Kowalski limitation:

• limited configuration through kowalski.yml
• only one runner per machine (no multi-core yet)
• needs the tmpfs in fstab (WIP to make it optional)
• has to be hacked to change versions of services and setup/preparation procedures
• only RSpec is supported

TODO:

• get rid of capistrano for better parallelism of remote tasks on cap up
• support for multi-core testing
• abstract the capistrano commands and move more customization into kowalski.yml
• add more hooks
• add support for testing frameworks other than RSpec
• add support for projects other than rails apps
• add support for SCMs other than git

Installation

Clone Kowalski

git clone git://github.com/vrinek/kowalski.git
cd kowalski

Get the needed gems

bundle install

Setup the config

cp kowalski.yml.sample kowalski.yml
{mate|vim|emacs} kowalski.yml

Start hacking the capistrano tasks

{mate|vim|emacs} Capfile capistrano/*

Usage

Set up SSH access, ruby and everything else in capistrano/setup.rb

cap setup:all

Prepare needed services (found in Capfile and capistrano/prepare.rb)

cap up

Run the specs

cap run_specs

Drop all services on runners (found in Capfile) and free up the machines' resources

cap down

Get detailed info on all runners

cap report

Get simple info on all runners

cap status

Boot up the sinatra front

rake up

Kill the sinatra front

rake down

Tips

• Spork does not need to be setup properly if you don't use it in day-to-day testing. Just install it and put all the contents from spec_helper.rb in the Spork.preload block. On every spec run, spork gets up (and loads the environment) and after the run is goes down so every run is fresh.
• Write a rake namespace for each service you use (e.g. mongodb) that has an up task (mongo:up) and a down (mongo:down) (sample)