smoke.sh, a minimal smoke testing framework in Bash

Are you "smoke testing" your application after a deploy? You probably are! But have you automated it? When we deploy at Qandidate.com there are usually a few things we quickly check by hand:

• does the app load?
• can I login?
• are the overview pages working?
• can I create a vacancy?

These checks are easy to do, but the process is mostly in the heads of the developers and our product owner. Coordination is in the form of "Ok, the deploy is done, can you click around?". Can we do better?

Meet smoke.sh!

smoke.sh is a minimal smoke testing framework written in Bash. It helps you with automating the simple checks you perform after deploying. Checking if the main page of your app loads is as easy as:

#!/bin/bash

. smoke.sh

smoke_url_ok "http://example.org"
smoke_report

That was quite easy, right? (Go implement this check for your app now! I'll wait. ;-) )

Checking for page content

So the url loads loads and returns a 2xx HTTP response code. Knowing this isn't always enough. It might just be that your server is happily serving the apache default page. To account for situations like these smoke.sh can also check if certain text snippets are available on the page:

smoke_url_ok "http://example.org"
    smoke_assert_body "search"
    smoke_assert_body "login"

Smoke testing forms

While smoke_url_ok will do a GET request on the given URL, there are also forms you check when clicking through your freshly deployed app. Checking forms can be done using smoke_form_ok and specifying a URL and a file containing the data to be POST'ed.

smoke_form_ok "http://example.org/login" data/login
    smoke_assert_body "Hi John Do!"

Hint: use the network tab of for example the chrome debugger to post a form by hand and then copy the data over to a file.

Performing checks as a privileged user

smoke.sh is stateful. After each requested url, the content of the response is available for the asserts. The framework also saves all cookies and uses them when a new request is issued. Successfully posting the login form and subsequently checking protected pages is possible!

Base URLs and CSRF tokens

The framework has configuration options to set a base URL to be prepended for each path and the possibility to register a custom after response handler to extract and set an appropriate CSRF token for smoke.sh to use. Refer to the README for documentation and examples.

What's next?

Most importantly, go and create a smoke.sh test for your app that checks if it still loads! After that imagine all the cool things you could do:

• notify your team about failure/success on IRC
• setup a post deploy hook to automatically roll back if the smoke tests fail
• more?