mspectator

Use RSpec and MCollective to test your fleet

Goal

This project provides a way to test your fleet of servers using RSpec and MCollective.

It is similar to the serverspec project, but it uses MCollective instead of SSH as a network facility, and it allows to test more than a host at a time.

Installing

Client side

On the client side (where you run rspec), you need mspectator itself:

gem install mspectator

You also need to have an MCollective client set up, as well as RSpec.

Server side

On the server side (the hosts you are testing), you need:

• An MCollective node with the spec agent;
• serverspec;

Example

The matchers allow to test hosts based on filters, using classes and facts. Below is an example:

require 'mspectator'

describe "apache::server" do
  it { should find_nodes(10).or_less.with_agent('spec') }
  it { should have_certificate.signed }
  it { should pass_puppet_spec }

  context "when on Debian", :facts => [:operatingsystem => "Debian"] do
    it { should find_nodes(5).or_more }
    it { should have_service('apache2').with(
      :ensure => 'running',
      :enable => 'true'
      )
    }
    it { should have_package('apache2') }
    it { should have_user('www-data') }
  end
end

Architecture

Network architecture and libraries

The general architecture of the solution is the following:

 +-------------------------------------+           +-------------------------------------+
 |      Client                         |           |        Server                       |
 |-------------------------------------|           |-------------------------------------|
 |                                     |           |                                     |
 |     rspec                           |           |                                     |
 |       +                             |           |                                     |
 |       | (check_action, *args)       |           |                                     |
 |       v                             |           |                                     |
 |  MCollective::RPC#rpcclient         |           |         Specinfra::Backend::Exec    |
 |       |                             |           |           ^                         |
 |       +                             |           |           | (check_action, *args)   |
 |       |                             |           |           +                         |
 |       +------------------------------------------->  MCollective::RPC::Agent          |
 |                action, *args        |           |                                     |
 |                                     |           |                                     |
 +-------------------------------------+           +-------------------------------------+

The components required for this architecture are:

• RSpec, on the client side;
• The serverspec backends and matchers, on the server side;
• The spec MCollective agent on the server side;
• A series of matchers on the client side to describe the hosts being tested.