NAME
Test::Nginx - Testing modules for Nginx C module development
DESCRIPTION
This distribution provides two testing modules for Nginx C module development:
All of them are based on Test::Base.
Usually, Test::Nginx::Socket is preferred because it works on a much lower level and not that fault tolerant like Test::Nginx::LWP.
Also, a lot of connection hang issues (like wrong r->main->count
value in nginx 0.8.x) can only be captured by Test::Nginx::Socket because Perl's LWP::UserAgent client will close the connection itself which will conceal such issues from the testers.
Test::Nginx automatically starts an nginx instance (from the PATH
env) rooted at t/servroot/ and the default config template makes this nginx instance listen on the port 1984
by default. One can specify a different port number by setting his port number to the TEST_NGINX_PORT
environment, as in
export TEST_NGINX_PORT=1989
etcproxy integration
The default settings in etcproxy (https://github.com/chaoslawful/etcproxy) makes this small TCP proxy split the TCP packets into bytes and introduce 1 ms latency among them.
There's usually various TCP chains that we can put etcproxy into, for example
Test::Nginx <=> nginx
$ ./etcproxy 1234 1984
Here we tell etcproxy to listen on port 1234 and to delegate all the TCP traffic to the port 1984, the default port that Test::Nginx makes nginx listen to.
And then we tell Test::Nginx to test against the port 1234, where etcproxy listens on, rather than the port 1984 that nginx directly listens on:
$ TEST_NGINX_CLIENT_PORT=1234 prove -r t/
Then the TCP chain now looks like this:
Test::Nginx <=> etcproxy (1234) <=> nginx (1984)
So etcproxy can effectively emulate extreme network conditions and exercise "unusual" code paths in your nginx server by your tests.
In practice, *tons* of weird bugs can be captured by this setting. Even ourselves didn't expect that this simple approach is so effective.
nginx <=> memcached
We first start the memcached server daemon on port 11211:
memcached -p 11211 -vv
and then we another etcproxy instance to listen on port 11984 like this
$ ./etcproxy 11984 11211
Then we tell our t/foo.t test script to connect to 11984 rather than 11211:
# foo.t
use Test::Nginx::Socket;
repeat_each(1);
plan tests => 2 * repeat_each() * blocks();
$ENV{TEST_NGINX_MEMCACHED_PORT} ||= 11211; # make this env take a default value
run_tests();
__DATA__
=== TEST 1: sanity
--- config
location /foo {
set $memc_cmd set;
set $memc_key foo;
set $memc_value bar;
memc_pass 127.0.0.1:$TEST_NGINX_MEMCACHED_PORT;
}
--- request
GET /foo
--- response_body_like: STORED
The Test::Nginx library will automatically expand the special macro $TEST_NGINX_MEMCACHED_PORT
to the environment with the same name. You can define your own $TEST_NGINX_BLAH_BLAH_PORT
macros as long as its prefix is TEST_NGINX_
and all in upper case letters.
And now we can run your test script against the etcproxy port 11984:
TEST_NGINX_MEMCACHED_PORT=11984 prove t/foo.t
Then the TCP chains look like this:
Test::Nginx <=> nginx (1984) <=> etcproxy (11984) <=> memcached (11211)
If TEST_NGINX_MEMCACHED_PORT
is not set, then it will take the default value 11211, which is what we want when there's no etcproxy configured:
Test::Nginx <=> nginx (1984) <=> memcached (11211)
This approach also works for proxied mysql and postgres traffic. Please see the live test suite of ngx_drizzle and ngx_postgres for more details.
Usually we set both TEST_NGINX_CLIENT_PORT
and TEST_NGINX_MEMCACHED_PORT
(and etc) at the same time, effectively yielding the following chain:
Test::Nginx <=> etcproxy (1234) <=> nginx (1984) <=> etcproxy (11984) <=> memcached (11211)
as long as you run two separate etcproxy instances in two separate terminals.
It's easy to verify if the traffic actually goes through your etcproxy server. Just check if the terminal running etcproxy emits outputs. By default, etcproxy always dump out the incoming and outgoing data to stdout/stderr.
valgrind integration
Test::Nginx has integrated support for valgrind (http://valgrind.org) even though by default it does not bother running it with the tests because valgrind will significantly slow down the test sutie.
First ensure that your valgrind executable visible in your PATH env. And then run your test suite with the TEST_NGINX_USE_VALGRIND
env set to true:
TEST_NGINX_USE_VALGRIND=1 prove -r t
If you see false alarms, you do have a chance to skip them by defining a ./valgrind.suppress file at the root of your module source tree, as in
https://github.com/chaoslawful/drizzle-nginx-module/blob/master/valgrind.suppress
This is the suppression file for ngx_drizzle. Test::Nginx will automatically use it to start nginx with valgrind memcheck if this file does exist at the expected location.
If you do see a lot of "Connection refused" errors while running the tests this way, then you probably have a slow machine (or a very busy one) that the default waiting time is not sufficient for valgrind to start. You can define the sleep time to a larger value by setting the TEST_NGINX_SLEEP
env:
TEST_NGINX_SLEEP=1 prove -r t
The time unit used here is "second". The default sleep setting just fits my ThinkPad (Core2Duo T9600
).
Applying the no-pool patch to your nginx core is recommended while running nginx with valgrind:
https://github.com/shrimp/no-pool-nginx
The nginx memory pool can prevent valgrind from spotting lots of invalid memory reads/writes as well as certain double-free errors. We did find a lot more memory issues in many of our modules when we first introduced the no-pool patch in practice ;)
There's also more advanced features in Test::Nginx that have never documented. I'd like to write more about them in the near future ;)
Nginx C modules that use Test::Nginx to drive their test suites
- ngx_echo
- ngx_headers_more
- ngx_chunkin
- ngx_memc
- ngx_drizzle
- ngx_rds_json
- ngx_xss
- ngx_srcache
- ngx_lua
- ngx_set_misc
- ngx_array_var
- ngx_form_input
- ngx_iconv
- ngx_set_cconv
- ngx_postgres
- ngx_coolkit
SOURCE REPOSITORY
This module has a Git repository on Github, which has access for all.
http://github.com/agentzh/test-nginx
If you want a commit bit, feel free to drop me a line.
AUTHORS
agentzh (章亦春) <agentzh@gmail.com>
Antoine BONAVITA <antoine.bonavita@gmail.com>
COPYRIGHT & LICENSE
Copyright (c) 2009-2011, Taobao Inc., Alibaba Group (http://www.taobao.com).
Copyright (c) 2009-2011, agentzh <agentzh@gmail.com>
.
Copyright (c) 2011, Antoine Bonavita <antoine.bonavita@gmail.com>
.
This module is licensed under the terms of the BSD license.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
Neither the name of the Taobao Inc. nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
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