Checkbox

Revision 9 as of 2008-11-14 10:04:12

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Introduction

Checkbox (https://launchpad.net/checkbox) is a test runner for Ubuntu. It aims is to provide a common framework to run all types of tests, from hardware tests, to command line tests, unit tests or desktop tests and send their results to Launchpad, automatically.

General Configuration

Checkbox general configuration is stored at /etc/checkbox.d. Each way of calling checkbox (GUI, cli) has its own configuration file.

checkbox.ini

This is the general config file. It will be inherit by all the checkbox flavours.

  • [DEFAULT]. Under this section they are covered all general configuration properties.
    • version. The version of checkbox to use the configuration with.
    • plugins. Folder where checkbox plugins are stored.
    • registries. Folder where checkbox registries are stored.

Tests

Test are defined in plain text files, that can be stored anywhere.

They consists in some required fields and some optional fields.

Let's look at one example:

name: audio
plugin: manual
categories: laptop, desktop
requires: alsa.type == 'control'
command: audio_playback $data_path/audio_playback.wav
description: Testing detected sound card: . $(audio_playback --view) . Did you hear a sound?

Tests fields

Required fields

Field

Explanation

name

Unique name for a test

plugin

Plugin name to handle this test. Checkbox provides "manual" and "auto" by default

description

A description on what the test does. In the case of manual tests, this is the actual question asked to the enduser. In the case of automated tests, this is strictly informational.

Optional fields

Field

Explanation

architectures

List of architectures for which this test is relevant: amd64, i386, powerpc and/or sparc

categories

List of categories for which this test is relevant: desktop, laptop and/or server

command

Command to run for the test. This is not required for manual tests, but it can be used, anyway.

depends

List of names of tests on which this test depends. So, if the other test fails, this test will be skipped.

requires

Registry expressions which are requirements for this test: 'input.mouse' in info.capabilities

timeout

Timeout for running the command.

optional

Boolean expression set to True if this test is optional or False if this test is required.

Test Suites

These tests can be grouped by suites. A suite is basically a text file that contains one or more tests. Suites are available under the directory: /usr/share/checkbox/suites

All the files under that directory are automatically parsed for tests.

Tests suites are parsed by the suites_info plugin (check the Plugin section for more information about plugins)

Some of the options that we can see in the configuration file (checkbox.ini) for this plugin are:

\[checkbox/plugins/suites_info\]

  • directories = %(checkbox_directory)s/suites
    • The folder or folders where test suites are stored.
  • scripts_path = %(checkbox_directory)s/scripts
    • The folder where runnable scripts are stored.

Environment variables

Apart from the two options explained above, this is the place to define the environment variables that we want for our tests. From the example above this would be:

data_path = %(checkbox_directory)s/data

Plugins

Plugins are the mechanism to change Checkbox default behaviour. In fact, the "checkbox default behaviour" are plugins themselves.

A plugin is simply a Python module which registers for events. A minimal plugin would look like:

class Cr3Plugin(Plugin):
    def register(self, manager):
       super(Cr3Plugin, self).register(manager)
       self._manager.reactor.call_on("report", self.report)
       
       def report(self):
           self._manager.reactor.fire("report-cr3", "cr3 is in #ubuntu-classroom")
           factory = Cr3Plugin

A plugin should inherit from the Plugin class and it should register to be called on particular events. In this example it is registered to call the report method upon the "report" event.

self._manager.reactor.call_on("report", self.report)

The report method itself fires the "report-cr3" and anyone who has registered for this particular event will be called.

self._manager.reactor.fire("report-cr3", "cr3 is in #ubuntu-classroom")

The plugin should provide a global factory variable which will be the hook for instantiating your plugin.

Registries

Tips And Tricks

[/TipsAndTricks]