[chef] Re: Re: Unit testing HWRPs

[Benjamin Bytheway < >]

A couple more questions came up today as I continued writing and testing.  

Most of the examples I've been able to find of HWRP don't make very extensive use of already existing chef core resources.  I guess LWRPs are more generally used for this?  

Basically the provider I'm writing is assembling mostly basic chef resources, but in a complex enough way that I have a number of helper methods, and wanted to break things up into more modular method calls to do the work and make testing easier.

I found early on that providers include the recipe dsl, so I can use primitives like "template," "cookbook_file," etc. as opposed to Chef::Resource::Template.  This also had the positive side effect of (with just a little work), letting me use chefspec to both ensure that things don't fully converge on my test box and get access to its nice rspec matchers.

Then I got to thinking that the recipe dsl is adding things to the resource_collection, even if i manually call run_action on the resource during my provider action. So it is added to the resource collection after my HWRP, and touched again even though it doesn't re-run the action (still can't figure out where that is getting skipped, but glad it is). 

Is this use of the recipe dsl in providers a dark path I shouldn't be treading down? Like I said, I really haven't found many full providers out there that make heavy use of core chef resources and even fewer that have spec suites.

-Ben

On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 10:04 AM, Joshua Timberman < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

When I rewrote the runit_service definition to be a service resource,
I made it "heavyweight" for two reasons:

1. I wanted to subclass Chef's service resource, to reuse some of its
functionality and have runit_service behave like other services.

2. It was easier to do unit testing of it this way. You can see the
unit tests here:
https://github.com/hw-cookbooks/runit/blob/master/test/spec/libraries/provider_runit_service_spec.rb

For testing LWRPs, you can use the step_into feature of ChefSpec.
Documentation is on the ChefSpec site.
http://code.sethvargo.com/chefspec/

Hope this helps.

-Joshua

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Benjamin Bytheway < "> > wrote:

> I have a cookbook that uses LWRPs to configure some weblogic domains.  The
> LWRP is getting really complex and deserves (I think) to be made into an
> HWRP with more complete unit tests, etc.
>
> Does anyone know of best practices for unit testing HRWPs like this?
>
> I found that the dsh cookbook (https://github.com/rcbops-cookbooks/dsh) does
> have a spec tested HWRP, which ends up stubbing method calls on the chef
> providers used to prevent them from converging on the test machine. Is this
> the best approach to take?
>
> Anyone have suggestions or places to start digging?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ben

--
Joshua Timberman, Chef.