Some Additional Serverspec Types

Serverspec is an rspec-based framework for testing live machines, and making assertions about things like the output of commands, installed packages, running services, file content, etc. However, it has a relatively limited and basic set of Resource Types that it can test for.

Before Serverspec completely disabled their GitHub issue tracker (they now seem to have no issue tracker at all), I’d suggested some improvements for more advanced resource types, such as one that can perform an HTTP GET against an application and check the status code and/or output. I was told in no uncertain terms that this is a task for application integration testing, and that it’s “not what Serverspec is for.”

I humbly disagree. I’ve begun migrating my Linode to an EC2 machine, using some technology that I’ve been using at my day job; specifically, Puppet to configure the machine and Packer to build an AMI. Instead of using Cloudformation to spin up an entire stack, I just use a Rakefile to spin up a new EC2 instance, test it, and swap an Elastic IP if all the tests pass. Of course, this requires that I have relatively complete automated testing of the EC2 instance. Stock Serverspec can handle 95% of what I want to test, but there are a few other, more complex, things that it can’t. So, I wrote some code to fix that.

I’ll admit right off the bat that this code doesn’t really work the way Serverspec is intended to, but it works and it’s relatively simple. This largely breaks the abstraction of serverspec using specinfra under the hood, but I’m not sure if that’s even a concern (since specinfra seems to be all about testing a running machine via some local command execution mechanism, and two of the types that I wrote use network IO instead).

For the time being, I’ve written three additional types that solve some specific use cases for me:

• A bitlbee type that connects to a Bitlbee IRC gateway, authenticates, and checks the running bitlbee version. It has matchers to check whether or not the connection and authentication was successful, whether or not it timed out, and the bitlbee version. Parameters for the type include login nick and password, bitlbee port, and whether or not to connect with SSL.
• A http_get type which connects to the system under test (with a specified port) and issues a HTTP GET request for a specified path, with a specified Host header and a timeout (default 10 seconds). Matchers are provided for the response content body (string), response headers (hash), HTTP status code, and whether or not the request timed out (which also sets a status of 0).
• A virtualenv type for testing python virtualenvs. It takes the absolute path to the venv on the filesystem, and uses serverspec’s built-in file and command execution features to ensure that the path “looks like” a virtualenv, and has matchers for the pip and python versions used in the venv as well as the pip freeze output as a hash of requirements and their versions.

Hopefully this will be of use to someone else as well. As I continue using serverspec, I plan on adding to the types.

The code for serverspec-extended-types is on GitHub (pull requests and issues welcome) and it’s packaged and hosted as a ruby gem. Installation and usage is as simple as adding it to your Gemfile and spec_helper and then using the types and matchers in your specs.