CI/CD Integration

Up until now, we have run our test files locally. Now, we want to integrate them in a CI/CD pipeline (like GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD pipelines). As Hurl is very fast, we’re going to run our tests on each commit of our project, drastically improving the project quality.

A typical web project pipeline is:

build the application, run unit tests and static code analysis,
publish the application image to a Docker registry,
pull the application image and run integration tests.

In this workflow, we’re testing the same image that will be used and deployed in production.

For the tutorial, we are skipping build and publication phases and only run integration tests on a prebuilt Docker image. To check a complete project with build, Docker upload/publish and integration tests, go to https://github.com/jcamiel/quiz

In a first step, we’re going to write a bash script that will pull our Docker image, launch it and run Hurl tests against it. Once we have checked that this script runs locally, we’ll see how to run it automatically in a CI/CD pipeline.

Integration Script

First, create a directory name quiz-project, add integration/basic.hurl and integration/create-quiz.hurl from the previous tutorial to the directory.

$ mkdir quiz-project
$ cd quiz-project
$ mkdir integration
$ vi integration/basic.hurl

# Import <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jcamiel/quiz/master/integration/basic.hurl">basic.hurl</a> here!

$ vi integration/create-quiz.hurl

# Import <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jcamiel/quiz/master/integration/create-quiz.hurl">create-quiz.hurl</a> here!

Next, we are going to write the first version of our integration script that will just pull the Quiz image and run it:

Create a script named bin/integration.sh with the following content:

None

Make the script executable and run it:

$ chmod u+x bin/integration.sh
$ bin/integration.sh
Starting Quiz container
5d311561828d6078e84eb4b8b87dfd5d67bde6d9614ad83860b60cf310438d2a

Verify that our container is up and running, and stop it.

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                         COMMAND                  CREATED         STATUS         PORTS                                       NAMES
c685f3887cc1   ghcr.io/jcamiel/quiz:latest   "java -jar app/quiz.…"   3 seconds ago   Up 3 seconds   0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp, :::8080->8080/tcp   quiz
$ docker stop quiz
quiz

Now, we have a basic script that starts our container. Before adding our integration tests, we need to ensure that our application server is ready: the container has started, but the application server can take a few seconds to be really ready to accept incoming HTTP requests.

To do so, we can test our health API. With a function wait_for_url, we use Hurl to check a given URL to return a 200 OK. We loop on this function until the check succeeds with --retry Hurl option. Once the test has succeeded, we stop the container.

Modify bin/integration.sh to wait for the application to be ready:

None

We have now the simplest integration test script: it pulls a Quiz image, then starts the container and waits for a 200 OK response.

Next, we’re going to add our Hurl tests to the script.

Modify bin/integration.sh to add integration tests:

None

Run bin/integration.sh to check that our application passes all tests:

$ bin/integration.sh
Starting Quiz container
48cf21d193a01651fc42b80648abdb51dc626f31c3f9c8917aea899c68eb4a12
Starting Quiz instance to be ready
Testing http://localhost:8080
Wait 0s
Wait 1s
Wait 2s
Wait 3s
Wait 4s
Wait 5s
Running Hurl tests
integration/basic.hurl: Running [1/2]
integration/basic.hurl: Success (4 request(s) in 18 ms)
integration/create-quiz.hurl: Running [2/2]
integration/create-quiz.hurl: Success (6 request(s) in 18 ms)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Executed files:  2
Succeeded files: 2 (100.0%)
Failed files:    0 (0.0%)
Duration:        48 ms
Stopping Quiz instance
quiz

Locally, our test suite is now fully functional. As Hurl is very fast, we can use it to ensure that new developments don’t have regression. Our next step is to run the integration tests automatically in a CI/CD pipeline. As an example, we’re going to create a [GitHub Action]. You can also see how to integrate your tests in GitLab CI/CD here.

Running Tests with GitHub Action

Create a new empty repository in GitHub, named quiz-project:

Create new GitHub repository

On your computer, create a git repo in quiz-project directory and commit the projects files:

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/jc/Documents/Dev/quiz-project/.git/
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Add integration tests."
[master (root-commit) ea3e5cd] Add integration tests.
 3 files changed, 146 insertions(+)
 create mode 100755 bin/integration.sh
...
$ git branch -M main
$ git remote add origin https://github.com/jcamiel/quiz-project.git
$ git push -u origin main
Enumerating objects: 7, done.
Counting objects: 100% (7/7), done.
...

Next, we are going to add a GitHub Action to our repo. The purpose of this action will be to launch our integration script on each commit.

Create a file in .github/workflows/ci.yml:

name: CI

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: read
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Build
        run: echo "Building app..."
      - name: Integration test
        run: |
          curl --location --remote-name https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/releases/download/3.0.0/hurl_3.0.0_amd64.deb
          sudo dpkg -i hurl_3.0.0_amd64.deb
          bin/integration.sh

Commit and push the new action:

$ git add .github/workflows/ci.yml
$ git commit -m "Add GitHub action."
[main 077d754] Add GitHub action.
 1 file changed, 19 insertions(+)
 ...
$ git push
Enumerating objects: 6, done.
Counting objects: 100% (6/6), done.
...

Finally, you can check on GitHub that our action is running:

GitHub Action