python-novaclient/novaclient/tests/functional/README.rst

python-novaclient functional testing

Idea

Over time we have noticed two issues with novaclient unit tests.

• Does not exercise the CLI
• We can get the expected server behavior wrong, and test the wrong thing.

We are using functional tests, run against a running cloud (primarily devstack), to address these two cases.

Additionally these functional tests can be considered example uses of python-novaclient.

These tests started out in tempest as read only nova CLI tests, to make sure the CLI didn't simply stacktrace when being used (which happened on multiple occasions).

Testing Theory

We are treating python-novaclient as legacy code, so we do not want to spend a lot of effort adding in missing features. In the future the CLI will move to python-openstackclient, and the python API will be based on the OpenStack SDK project. But until that happens we still need better functional testing, to prevent regressions etc.

Since python-novaclient has two uses, CLI and python API, we should have two sets of functional tests. CLI and python API. The python API tests should never use the CLI. But the CLI tests can use the python API where adding native support to the CLI for the required functionality would involve a non trivial amount of work.

Functional Test Guidelines

• Consume credentials via standard client environmental variables:

  OS_USERNAME
  OS_PASSWORD
  OS_TENANT_NAME
  OS_AUTH_URL

• Usage of insecure SSL can be configured via the standard client environment variable:

  OS_INSECURE

• Try not to require an additional configuration file