urchin/execution-flow
2016-04-08 21:10:01 +00:00

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Here I discuss Urchin's general execution flow and how it is handled
specifically when tests are run on remote environments.
Steps of an Urchin run
----------------------
When Urchin runs a directory of files, it goes through the following
steps.
1. Head
2. Test
3. Foot
4. Reporting
Urchin stores files in a temporary directory, creating a new directory
on each invocation. The directory contains these things.
* head (file)
* test (file)
* foot (file)
* stdout (directory)
When run on remotes, the temporary directory corresponding to the local
master process additionally has these files.
* remote-test
Messages from the head, test, and foot steps go in the corresponding
files. In the head and foot phases, messages are just simple prints.
Messages from the test phase always correspond to a particular test
file, and they are written to the test file in a delimiter-separated
format.
Stdout and stderr from test runs are written to files in the stdout
directory, one file per test file per shell that the file is run in.
The reporting phase
----------------------
In most cases Urchin begins printing to the screen only during the
reporting phase. The only case where anything is printed beforehand is
when Urchin is run with -vvvv; that sets "+x", so the commands are
printed as they run, though all other output is still suppressed.
Test results are reported in the reporting phase. Four output formats
are available.
1. Urchin's human-readable format (default)
2. Test Anything Protocol
3. Delimiter-separated values (used internally)
4. Remote Urchin worker output
Most of the output is generated based on the delimiter-separated values
in the test log file. The first two formats also include stdout and
stderr from the tests, depending on verbosity level flags; when it needs
these, Urchin reads them from appropriate files in the temporary
directory.
I could discuss the further details of each format elsewhere.
Remotes
----------------------
When Urchin runs tests on a remote, it copies tests to the remote and
then calls Urchin on the remote with "--format=remote". This specifies
the following.
* The temporary directory should be kept, rather than deleted, after
Urchin runs.
* The path of the temporary directory should be printed as output.
* No other output should be printed to stdout.
After the remote Urchin finishes running, the local urchin downloads
the remote Urchin's test log file from the temporary directory.
It modifies the file to include the remote's name and then concatenates
the result to the "remote-test" file in the local temporary directory.
For example, the file from the remote might look like this,
:sh:Counting tests/.test/faila:0:not_ok
and the result might look like this.
nsa:sh:Counting tests/.test/faila:0:not_ok
This gets processed in the reporting step like usual, according to
whatever format is specified. Instead of printing just "sh" as the
environment in which the particular test was run, the report will print
"sh on nsa".
When it needs the stdout files, it prints them over ssh.
New flags
----------
In making this remotes feature, I wound up adding some others.
-r, --remote SSH host to use as a remote
-F, --format Output format, one of "urchin", "tap", "dsv", "remote"
Urchin runs only locally by default. If you pass at least one --remote
flag, Urchin runs tests only on the specified remotes; it can't run both
locally and remotely in the same run. If you want to do that, you could
wait until I add that feature, or you can add "localhost" as a remote.
Settings that I'm thinking about
* Port for rsync/ssh
* SSH protocol version
* --rsync-path
Can those all be set in ssh_config? Probably not --rsync-path, but
I guess I could just fix it on the remote.