Introduction

Items contributed to the community hub by the EWC are tested at regular intervals to ensure functionality is preserved as the platform evolves. This testing is automated for deployable Items of the Ansible Playbook Technology. 

At a glance, the automation offers:

• VM provisioned
• Item installation on the new VM
• Cleanup after deployment (on success or failure)
• Summary report generation
• Artifacts upload  (for auditing and issue tracing, contains run logs, package versions and other useful runtime information)

The same automation used internally by the EWC, with the same functionality, is public as a Community Hub Item (see Ansible Playbook Test Deployment via GitHub Actions), and you , as an Item owner, can drag-and-drop it into your GitHub repository if you wish to make regular testing less of a chore and more of a standard and effortless part of your development process.

This page walks you through an example of how said drag-and-drop operation would look in practice for a community-contributed Item, for example Pytroll Processing, with on-demand deployment to EUMETSAT site.

Prerequisites

GitHub source code hosting

Push your Item's source code (Ansible Playbook), or a mirror of it, to a GitHub repository.

Step-by-Step Setup

1. Get OpenStack API credentials (see How to request OpenStack Application Credentials section of the EWC documentation)
2. Extract the following attributes from your app credentials and store them within your repository's GitHub secrets (see Creating secrets for a repository section of the GitHub documentation):

1. • OS_AUTH_URL
   • OS_REGION_NAME
   • OS_APPLICATION_CREDENTIAL_ID
   • OS_APPLICATION_CREDENTIAL_SECRET
2. Create an SSH keypair (see Generating a new SSH key section of the GitHub documentation )
   • Create a keypair (if none available).
   • Import SSH keys (public) (into OpenStack for automatic distribution upon VM creation).
3. Add you SSH public key to OpenStack (see Import SSH Key section of the EWC documentation).
4. Once more, update your repository's GitHub secrets to include the value of the private ssh key as: 
   • ANSIBLE_SSH_PRIVATE_KEY
5. Create a GitHub workflow configuration file, copy-paste the example snippet shown in the Usage section of the Item's documentation, and add an inputs  attribute with reasonable default values that meet the demand of your Item. 

Commit the file to the main branch of your repository and move to the next section start triggering Item deployment tests.

Triggering Tests via GitHub Actions UI

1. Browse to your GitHub Repository's Actions tab, and select the new workflow for the list on the left side panel

   

2. Click on Run workflow, override the defaults or provide values for the empty inputs if necessary (optional, useful if you want to change the VM Image, or Ansible version to test on, etc.)
   
3. Scroll to the bottom of the screen an confirm by clicking on Run workflow
4. Await for the run to complete to gain access to the report summary.

 If the test is successful you shall see are report directly in the UI, such as the following:

On the other hand, if the test deployment fails, you can check the report to understand if the problem is specific to the Item or the underlying VM provisioning, or dig deeper on run logs for details, or inspect the artifacts if available. This should allow you to pin point the reason of the failure without the need to run tests on your local environment.

Conclusion

In five steps and with a few clicks you now have a simple way to make tests not only easy to trigger but also to reproduce.

Related Articles

• Deploying by Technology: Terraform Module
• Deploying via ewccli
• Item Technology