On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:19:53 -0700, Rob Hoadley <hoadley@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, I'm curious if anyone has written a trial test to verify the correct startup of a .tac file.

I have a buildbot running automated trial tests on all the services I've written but nothing that closes the loop by building up the services by running the tac file similarly to the way that you'd use trial. Ideally, I'd like to verify that the MultiService has properly started up all the services from a list defined by the test. I know this a fairly nitpicking problem. In production, It's easy for me to just ssh into the running process and see what's going on via the manhole. But, I was hoping to catch a badly behaving tac file in the buildbot. It may be something out of the scope of trial but I was hoping someone has some integration test approaches for a twisted project they could share.

This is definitely one of the big shortcomings of .tac files. I generally approach this by absolutely minimizing the amount of code in the .tac file itself. This doesn't help you test the code that's there, but if you're limited to importing a function that creates your service, calling that function, and attaching it to the application object, at least there's very little code that's untested, and it should be modified very infrequently. I welcome any suggestions for a better answer than this one. It would probably be easy to make a case for the inclusion of some APIs to help out tests. `twisted.application.service.loadApplication´ might even go towards this end already - I've never tried writing a test using it, but maybe that would work out well. Jean-Paul

On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:19:53 -0700, Rob Hoadley <hoadley@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, I'm curious if anyone has written a trial test to verify the correct startup of a .tac file.

I have a buildbot running automated trial tests on all the services I've written but nothing that closes the loop by building up the services by running the tac file similarly to the way that you'd use trial. Ideally, I'd like to verify that the MultiService has properly started up all the services from a list defined by the test. I know this a fairly nitpicking problem. In production, It's easy for me to just ssh into the running process and see what's going on via the manhole. But, I was hoping to catch a badly behaving tac file in the buildbot. It may be something out of the scope of trial but I was hoping someone has some integration test approaches for a twisted project they could share.

This is definitely one of the big shortcomings of .tac files. I generally approach this by absolutely minimizing the amount of code in the .tac file itself. This doesn't help you test the code that's there, but if you're limited to importing a function that creates your service, calling that function, and attaching it to the application object, at least there's very little code that's untested, and it should be modified very infrequently. I welcome any suggestions for a better answer than this one. It would probably be easy to make a case for the inclusion of some APIs to help out tests. `twisted.application.service.loadApplication´ might even go towards this end already - I've never tried writing a test using it, but maybe that would work out well. Jean-Paul