README.rst

libtaskotron

libtaskotron is a library for running automated tasks as part of the Taskotron system. The initial objective is (but is not limited to) automating selected package checks in Fedora.

The project is not yet to be considered stable - the features contained are generally functional but we will likely continue to make major changes in how libtaskotron works.

For more information and API documentation, please look at Taskotron project page.

Please direct questions and comments to either #fedora-qa on freenode or the qa-devel mailing list.

Installing a Development Environment

Please consider whether you really need a libtaskotron development environment. Maybe you simply want to develop tests using libtaskotron? In that case, please follow libtaskotron install instructions instead. If you really want to develop libtaskotron itself, please continue.

For the moment, libtaskotron can't be fully installed by either pip or rpm and needs a bit of both for now.

On your Fedora system, install the necessary packages:

sudo dnf install       \
createrepo             \
gcc                    \
git                    \
koji                   \
libtaskotron-config    \
libvirt-python         \
mash                   \
python-doit            \
python-hawkey          \
python-pip             \
python-rpmfluff        \
python-virtualenv      \
rpm-build              \
rpm-python

If you have not yet cloned the repository, do it now:

git clone https://pagure.io/taskotron/libtaskotron.git
cd libtaskotron

Then, set up the virtualenv:

virtualenv --system-site-packages env_taskotron
source env_taskotron/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

If you encounter any installation issues, it's possible that you don't have gcc and necessary C development headers installed to compile C extensions from PyPI. Either install those based on the error messages, or install the necessary packages directly to your system. See requirements.txt to learn how.

Finally, you should install libtaskotron in editable mode. This way you don't need to reinstall the project every time you make some changes to it, the code changes are reflected immediately:

pip install -e .

Before running any task, you also need to manually create a few required directories. First, create a taskotron group if you don't have it already, and add your user to it (you'll need to re-login afterwards):

getent group taskotron || sudo groupadd taskotron
sudo usermod -aG taskotron <user>

Now create the directories with proper permissions:

sudo install -d -m 775 -g taskotron /var/tmp/taskotron /var/log/taskotron \
  /var/cache/taskotron /var/lib/taskotron /var/lib/taskotron/artifacts \
  /var/lib/taskotron/images

Configuration

The libtaskotron-config package installs config files with default values into /etc/taskotron. If you need to change those default values, you can either change the files in /etc/taskotron or you can create config files inside your checkout with:

cp conf/taskotron.yaml.example conf/taskotron.yaml
cp conf/yumrepoinfo.conf.example conf/yumrepoinfo.conf

The configuration files in conf/ take precedence over anything in /etc, so make sure that you're editing the correct file if you create local copies.

In the development environment, it's also useful to have taskotron-generated files automatically cleaned up, so that they don't occupy disk space in vain. There is a tmpfiles.d template prepared for you, look into conf/tmpfiles.d.

Running a Task

A relatively simple example task is rpmlint.

The task requires the rpmlint tool to be installed, so be sure to run:

sudo dnf install rpmlint

To run that task against a koji build with NVR <nvr>, do the following:

git clone https://bitbucket.org/fedoraqa/task-rpmlint.git
runtask -i <nvr> -t koji_build task-rpmlint/runtask.yml

This will download the <nvr> from koji into a temp directory under /var/tmp/taskotron/, run rpmlint on the downloaded rpms and print output in YAML format to stdout.

Example:

runtask -i htop-2.0.2-1.fc24 -t koji_build task-rpmlint/runtask.yml

Using Disposable Clients for Task Execution

When executing the task on the local machine is not desirable, you can use the disposable client feature - a new virtual machine is spawned from a base image and the task is executed in the VM.

Note: you need to setup Testcloud first refer to Setting up Testcloud

To use the feature, just add --libvirt parameter to the runtask command:

runtask --libvirt -i htop-2.0.2-1.fc24 -t koji_build task-rpmlint/runtask.yml

By default, a base image defined by the imageurl option in taskotron.yaml config file is used. You can provide your own base image by changing the imageurl value (use file:// URL to point to a local file).

We also provide updated base images at https://tflink.fedorapeople.org/taskotron/taskotron-cloud/images/ (note that the image needs to be uncompressed before use).

If you store these images in /var/lib/taskotron/images, adhere to their naming conventions and set force_imageurl=False in taskotron.yaml, we will find the latest one available automatically for you and you don't need to update the imageurl option regularly.

Setting up Testcloud

Configure ssh key for Testcloud to use (the private key must be passwordless). Edit ~/.config/testcloud/settings.py or /etc/testcloud/settings.py and insert the respective public key in the place of the $SSH PUBKEY HERE$ string:

USER_DATA = """#cloud-config
users:
  - default
  - name: root
    password: %s
    chpasswd: { expire: False }
    ssh-authorized-keys:
      - $SSH PUBKEY HERE$
"""

Running the Test Suite

You can run the included test suite of unit and functional tests. Have the virtualenv active and from the root checkout directory execute:

py.test

A nice HTML-based representation is available if you add --cov-report=html command line parameter.

If you write new tests, be sure to run this to see whether the code is sufficiently covered by your tests.

Building Documentation

Libtaskotron's documentation is written in reStructuredText and built using Sphinx.

The documentation is easy to build if you have followed the instructions to set up a development environment.

To actually build the documentation:

doit builddocs

Build Automation

There are several development related tasks which are at least somewhat automated using doit.

After either installing the doit package (python-doit, python3-doit) or via pip (pip install doit), you can see a list of available tasks and a short description of those tasks by running doit list. Some of the available tasks are:

  • buildsrpm takes a snapshot of current git repo and uses the in-repo spec file to build a matching srpm in the builds/<version> directory. Note that if a snapshot already exists for a given version, a new snapshot will not be generated until the existing one is deleted.
  • chainbuild uses mockchain and the existing COPR repo to build a noarch binary rpm from the latest srpm.
  • builddocs builds documentation from current git sources

By default, the tool is pretty quiet but if you would like to see more verbose output, add --verbosity 2 to the doit command and all stdout/stderr output will be shown.