Acceptance testing MirageOS installs

I’m pretty interested in MirageOS at the moment. Partly because I find the idea behind unikernels interesting and partly because I keep bumping into the nice folks OCaml Labs in Cambridge.

In order to write and build your MirageOS unikernel application you need an OCaml development environment. Although this is documented I wanted something a little more repeatable. I also found and reported a few bugs in the documentation which got me thinking about acceptance testing. I’m not (yet) an OCaml programmer, but infrastructure automation and testing I can do.

Into Puppet

I started out writing a Puppet module to install and manage everything, which is now available on GitHub and on the Forge.

This lets you do something like the following, and have a fully working MirageOS setup on Ubuntu 12.04 or 14.04.

class { 'mirageos':
  user      => 'vagrant',
  opam_root => '/home/vagrant/.opam',
}

Given time, inclination or pull requests I’ll add support for other operating systems in the future.

But how do you know it works?

The module has a small unit test suite, but it’s nice to know test the actual running of Puppet and installation of the software. For this I’ve used Test Kitchen and ServerSpec. This allows for spinning up 2 virtual machines (one for each supported operating system), applying the Puppet manifest and then making some assertions:

The above is simply checking whether certain packages are installed, the PPA is setup correctly and whether mirage and opam can be executed cleanly.

Can it produce a working unikernel?

The above tells us whether the installation worked, but not whether the resulting software allows us to build MirageOS unikernels. For this I used Bats running in the same Test Kitchen setup.

The above configures and builds a simple HTTP server unikernel, and then checks that when run it returns the expected response on the correct port.

Conclusion

I like the separation of concerns above. I can use the Puppet code without the test code, or even swap the Puppet code out for a shell script if I wanted. I could also run the serverspec tests anywhere I want to check state, which is the reason for separating those tests from the one’s building and running a unikernel. Overall the tool chain for ad-hoc infrastructure testing (quick mention of Infrataster too) is really quite powerful and approachable. I’d love to see more software ship with a user-facing test suite for people to verify their installation works.