Riak Test

Welcome to the exciting world of riak_test.

What is Riak Test?

riak_test is a system for testing Riak clusters. Tests are written in Erlang, and can interact with the cluster using distributed Erlang.

How does it work?

riak_test runs tests in a sandbox, typically /tmp/rt. The sanbox uses git to reset back to a clean state after tests are run. The contents of /tmp/rt might look something like this:

$ ls /tmp/rt
current riak-1.0.3 riak-1.1.4 riak-1.2.0

Inside each of these directories is a dev folder, typically created with your normal make [stage]devrel. So how does this sandbox get populated to begin with?

You'll create another directory that will contain full builds of different version of Riak for your platform. Typically this directory has been ~/test-releases but it can be called anything and be anywhere that you'd like. The dev/ directory from each of these releases will be copied into the sandbox (/tmp/rt). There are helper scripts in bin/ which will help you get both ~/test-releases and /tmp/rt all set up. A full tutorial for using them exists further down in this README.

There is one folder in /tmp/rt that does not come from ~/test-releases: current. The current folder can refer to any version of Riak, but is typically used for something like the master branch, a feature branch, or a release candidate. The /tmp/rt/current dev release gets populated from a devrel of Riak that can come from anywhere, but is usually your 'normal' git checkout of Riak. The bin/rtdev-current.sh can be run from within that folder to copy dev/ into /tmp/rt/current.

Once you have everything set up (again, instructions for this are below), you'll want to run and write tests. This repository also holds code for an Erlang application called riak_test. The actual tests exist in the test/ directory.

Bootstraping Your Test Environment

Running tests against a development version of Riak is just one of the things that you can do with riak_test. You can also test things involving upgrading from previous versions of Riak. Together, we'll get your test environment up and running. Scripts to help in this process are located in the bin directory of this project.

rtdev-all.sh

This script is for the lazy. It performs all of the setup steps described in the other scripts, including installing the current "master" branch from Github into "current". The releases will be built in your current working directory, so create an empty one in a place you'd like to store these builds for posterity, so that you don't have to rebuild them if your installation path (/tmp/rt by the way this script installs it) gets into a bad state, or deleted as tmpfs things tend to get during reboot.

If you do want to restore your /tmp/rt folder to factory condition, see rtdev-setup-releases.sh and if you want to change the current riak under test, see rtdev-current.sh.

rtdev-build-releases.sh

The first one that we want to look at is rtdev-build-releases.sh. If left unchanged, this script is going to do the following:

1. Download the source for the past three major Riak versions (e.g. 1.0.3, 1.1.4, and 1.2.0)
2. Build the proper version of Erlang that release was built with, using kerl (which it will also download)
3. Build those releases of Riak.

You'll want to run this script from an empty directory. Also, you might be thinking that you already have all the required versions of erlang. Great! You can crack open the script and set the paths to your installation:

R14B04=${R14B04:-$HOME/erlang-R14B04}

Kerlveat: If you want kerl to build erlangs with serious 64-bit macintosh action, you'll need a ~/.kerlrc file that looks like this:

KERL_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS="--disable-hipe --enable-smp-support --enable-threads --enable-kernel-poll  --enable-darwin-64bit"

The script will check that all these paths exist. If even one of them is missing, it will prompt you to install kerl, even if you already have kerl. If you say no, the script quits. If you say yes, or all of your erlang paths check out, then go get a cup of coffee, you'll be building for a little while.

Warning: If you are running OS X 10.7+ and trying to build Riak 1.0.3, then the erlang_js dependency won't compile for you, but it fails silently. Fortunately, the precomipled OS X build includes this dependency in it's working form. Just run rtdev-lion-fix.sh after rtdev-build-releases.sh to patch it. Please run this patch before proceeding on to the next script

rtdev-setup-releases.sh

The rtdev-setup-releases.sh will get the releases you just built into a local git repository. Currently, running this script from the same directory that you just built all of your releases into. Currently this script initializes this repository into /tmp/rt but it's probably worth making that configurable in the near term.

rtdev-current.sh

rtdev-current.sh is where it gets interesting. You need to run that from the Riak source folder you're wanting to test as the current version of Riak. Also, make sure that you've already run make devrel or make stagedevrel before you run rtdev-current.sh.

Config file.

Now that you've got your releases all ready and gitified, you'll need to tell riak_test about them. The method of choice is to create a ~/.riak_test.config that looks something like this:

{default, [
    {rt_max_wait_time, 180000},
    {rt_retry_delay, 1000}
]}.

{rtdev, [
    {rt_deps, ["$PATH_TO_YOUR_RIAK_SOURCE/deps"]},
    {rt_retry_delay, 500},
    {rt_harness, rtdev},
    {rtdev_path, [{root, "/tmp/rt"},
                  {current, "/tmp/rt/current"},
                  {"1.2.0", "/tmp/rt/riak-1.2.0"},
                  {"1.1.4", "/tmp/rt/riak-1.1.4"},
                  {"1.0.3", "/tmp/rt/riak-1.0.3"}]}
]}.

The default section of the config file will be overridden by the config name you specify. For example, running the command below will use an rt_retry_delay of 500 and an rt_max_wait_time of 180000. If your defaults contain every option you need, you can run riak_test without the -c argument.

Running riak_test for the first time

Run a test! ./riak_test -c rtdev -t verify_build_cluster

Did that work? Great, try something harder: ./riak_test -c rtdev_mixed -t upgrade