Testing deployment of pre-built .war to various web servers

[jfuerth]

Hi testing enthusiasts,

I'm itching to automate deployment testing of several Errai quickstart projects. Here's what we're doing by hand:

* Launch in Dev Mode and poke at the app (this can be handled already by the tooling we have)

  * Build a WAR and deploy it to Jetty 7, Jetty 8, Tomcat 7, JBoss AS 6, and JBoss AS 7. (Each server has its own Maven profile, so we need to do a clean build for each)

* Test that "mvn clean" properly deletes all generated files, bringing the project back to its pristine state

HtmlUnit is powerful enough to verify the app deployed correctly. Real browser testing is not important because the quickstarts are not intricately styled.

I feel like Arquillian has probably solved this problem already. Can I use Arquillian to deploy the target/${myapp}.war to an Arquillian Managed container, then load the page and poke at the DOM (fill in a form field, press a button, check for response) with HtmlUnit? It's a different use case than the docs and tutorials focus on: I explicitly don't want to use ShrinkWrap in this case, because the thing I'm testing is that the .war was assembled correctly. I also don't want to inject anything into my test case. I just want to load the page into HtmlUnit and poke at it.

I greatly appreciate any and all ideas about how to automate away this tedious job.

-Jonathan

[maschmid]

It is easy to deploy an existing war with ShrinkWrap:

ShrinkWrap.create(ZipImporter.class, "foo.war").importFrom(new File("target/foo.war"))

(you just have to make sure your test runs in the integration-test maven phase, that is after "package",  .. you will probably run the test itself in a completely different maven project anyway)

You can use HtmlUnitDriver with Arquillian Drone:

https://github.com/arquillian/arquillian-showcase/blob/master/ui/src/test/java/com/acme/ui/LoginScreenWebDriverTestCase.java

(just replace the "WebDriver" in the example with http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/HtmlUnitDriver )

[jfuerth]

Thanks, Marek. I tried that and it worked great.

I'm just now grappling with whether or not a Maven build is the appropriate vehicle for this type of deployment testing. It's a lot of baggage to add to the main pom generated by the archetype. Putting it in a second "deployment testing" pom alongside the main pom might be an option. It could be useful to show how to approach deployment testing, or it could be a big distraction from the quickstart itself.

Maybe just a script in the parent project that creates the archetype?

How have others approached testing of quickstarts that must be deployable to various containers?

-Jonathan

[kpiwko]

ShrinkWrap Maven Resolver contains a MavenImporter. Not really so much useful at this point of view, as it basically automagically picks up the result of "mvn package", however with possibility to select profiles and spawning a completely different Maven execution from Surefire (in upcoming versions), it should allow you to construct JAR/WAR/EAR easily.

See following for further details:

https://github.com/shrinkwrap/resolver/blob/master/impl-maven-integration-tests/war-sample/src/test/java/test/WarTestCase.java

[dan.j.allen]

This is very nice:

WebArchive archive = ShrinkWrap.create(MavenImporter.class, "test.war")
        .loadEffectivePom("pom.xml").importBuildOutput()
        .as(WebArchive.class);

Since this is a case which can come up quite often, and in some test suites be used over and over again, I'd like to see an annotation for this scenario (which activates this build chain under the covers). Something like:

@RunWith(Arquillian.class)
@DeployBuildOutput
public class MyFunctionalTest {
    @ArquillianResource
    private URL url;

   @Test
    public void shouldBehaveSomeWay() {
       // make a request to the url
    }
}

Of course, in this case, a @Deployment method would not be required (which is possible through an extension). Thoughts?

[dan.j.allen]

I had hacked up an extension prototype a while back that implements this idea, though it uses the older ShrinkWrap Resolver...which would be replaced w/ Karel's snippet.

https://gist.github.com/2477705

It reminded me I had a better name for the deploy annotation:

@RunWith(Arquillian.class)
@DeployProjectArtifact
public class MyFunctionalTest {
    ...
}

If we pursue this, where do you think this belongs? In Drone? In a module by itself?

[kpiwko]

Such requirement exists for a pretty long time here: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/ARQ-417 .

Now we have a ShrinkWrap Resolver Maven Plugin, @DeployBuildOutput might work without specifying path to the pom, active profiles, etc. However, IDE support for the plugin is still an open question here.

This is an actual show-stopper for the moment https://issues.jboss.org/browse/SHRINKRES-18 . If implemented, creating an Arquillian extension with @DeployBuildOuput annotation would be an easy task.

[kpiwko]

I think it should be a part of ShrinkWrap Maven Resolver. Once on classpath, you can do Maven magic for deployments.

[silenius]

+1 to add this to ShrinkWrap Maven Resolver.

Can you create a Jira entry to make it easier to follow?

[dan.j.allen]

It turns out, there was already a JIRA...it just was before its time

https://issues.jboss.org/browse/ARQ-74 - Base test deployment on project in which test is run