Help setting up a module development environment?

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1

NOOB alert! I’m struggling to setup a module development environment that includes support for unit tests and which the module development environment does not occur within the Ansible source tree directly. That is:

  • My module development environment is an Intellij project with a project root at /dev/ansible. Relative to this project root, my module sources are located in modules/packaging/os/snaps.py while my unit tests are in test/units/modules/packaging/os.test_snaps.py

  • The Ansible source lives in /dev/sdks/ansible2.4 which contains a clone of the Ansible repository
    I’ve tried the following without success:

  • Add test/units/modules and modules to the PYTHONPATH

  • source sdks/ansible2.4/hacking/env-setup

  • sdks/ansible2.4/test/runner/ansible-tests units --tox --python 3.5 snaps

  • symbolically link modules/packaging/os/snaps.py into the ansible2.4/lib/ansible/modules/packaging/os and symbolically link test/units/modules/packaging/os.test_snaps.py into ansible2.4/test/units/modules/packaging/os/test_snaps.py

  • source sdks/ansible2.4/hacking/env-setup

  • sdks/ansible2.4/test/runner/ansible-tests units --tox --python 3.5 snaps

In neither case is my test case found (Target pattern no matched: snaps)

Would anyone share how to setup a unit testing supporting module development environment?

Thx,

-steve

2

​Did you check

http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/intro_installation.html#running-from-source

and

http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/dev_guide/developing_modules_general.html
?

Serge

​

3

Serge,

Thanks for the info, it led me in the right direction. I had reviewed both documents, but missed the statement about running a pytest against a single test case.

I finally got the test case to work using the pytest -r a --cov=. --cov-report=html --fulltrace --color yes command referenced with the following caveats:

  1. The --cov parameters resulted in a failure. It looks like I’ll need to install the pytest-cov module. (And why isn’t this part of the requirements file?)
  2. As described the module unit testing appears to require that the module under test and the test itself be accessible in the ansible source tree. Any attempts to execute the test using a test stored outside the Ansible source tree fail. This strikes me as a bit weird/non-optimal. These are - at least for now - strictly inhouse modules that I want to control using git. I don’t need or want to clone and maintain the entire Ansible source simply to develop a module. I’m working around this for now by placing my source and test modules into the Ansible source tree as symbolic links.
    At any rate thank for pointing me in the right direction!

-steve