Integration tests vs. real Salt

[AdamMajer]

Unit tests are a great resource. But there should also be a way of verifying that API works correctly vs. real Salt server instead of just a wiremock.

Recently, there are dozens and dozens of Salt calls added to the library. Most of these are simple, convenience mappings and they probably work just fine today. But what happens if Salt changes - eg. upstream decision to change something? Then maybe "status.diskusage" no longer exists for some reason, or it is replaced with a different return format. As is, we can't detect that. There is no automatic tests to verify the API remains valid (please correct me if I'm wrong here!).

There should be an automatic way to test this entire API vs. a real server.

1. automatically deploy container(s) and install salt-master and salt-minion(s) in it
2. test all API calls vs. that master

Comments welcome.

[moio]

Great idea, this would be very cool to have (ideally in Travis CI or, if that's not feasible, in a Dockerized workload triggered by SUSE's internal Jenkins host).

Pull requests are very much welcome in this direction!

[AdamMajer]

This can be done in Travis CI, to an extent, but maybe that approach is a little "overkill" since aim here would be to test functionality between salt versions. For regular testing, pre-generated test cases should suffice.

I propose,

• record requests/responses from real salt - this can be done with wiremock, in "generate_tests" or similar target.
• replay above in normal unit tests.
• do this for all the calls.* packages

Then we get best of both worlds - reasonable fast unit tests, and tests vs. real salt during the "generate_tests" phase. I think it would be sufficient to test

1. did call succeed?
2. is result not empty? (ie. parsing of results worked)

Automatically generated tests would save a lot of boiler plate code (in unit tests) too, in addition to getting up-to-date saltstack responses.

I will see if I can get to this on Sunday or sometime next week. I've had very little free time in last few weeks 😢