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Running Tests

Dokku has a full test suite to assist in quick iterating development. These tests include a linter using shellcheck, functional unit tests using the Bats testing framework, and a deployment suite of example apps that use the most popular languages and frameworks.

We maintain the Dokku test harness within the tests directory:

  • tests/unit/*.bats: Bats tests
  • tests/apps/: Example applications that can be used for tests

Continuous Integration

All pull requests have tests run against them on GitHub Actions, a continuous integration platform that provides Docker support for Ubuntu Focal 20.04.

If you wish to skip tests for a particular commit, e.g. documentation changes, you may add the [ci skip] designator to your commit message. Commits that should be tested but have the above designator will not be merged.

While we do provide official packages for a variety of platforms, as our test suite currently runs on Ubuntu Focal 20.04, we only provide official installation support for that platform and the latest LTS release of Ubuntu (currently 20.04).

Local Test Execution

Vagrant VM

  • Setup Dokku in a Vagrant VM.
  • Run the following to setup tests and execute them:
vagrant ssh
sudo su -
cd ~/dokku
make ci-dependencies setup-deploy-tests

After making changes to your local Dokku clone, don't forget to update the Vagrant Dokku install.

# update vagrant dokku install from local git clone
make copyfiles

# build a specific plugin
make go-build-plugin copyplugin PLUGIN_NAME=apps

VSCode Dev Container

  • Open Dokku in a VSCode DevContainer
  • Run the following in the VSCode terminal to setup tests and execute them:
make ci-dependencies setup-deploy-tests

After making changes to your local Dokku clone, don't forget to update the Vagrant Dokku install.

# update vagrant dokku install from local git clone
make copyfiles

# build a specific plugin
make go-build-plugin copyplugin PLUGIN_NAME=apps

Executing tests

Execute the entire test suite (linter, bats tests, and app deployment tests):

make test

Run the linter

make lint

Execute all bats tests

make unit-tests

Execute all app deployment tests

make deploy-tests

Executing App Tests

You may run a specific app deployment tests with a target similar to:

make deploy-test-nodejs-express

For a full list of test make targets check out tests.mk in the root of the Dokku repository.

Executing a single test suite

When working on a particular plugin, it may be useful to run only a particular test suite. This can be done by specifying the test suite path:

bats tests/unit/apps_1.bats

It is also possible to target multiple test suites at a time.

bats tests/unit/apps_1.bats tests/unit/certs.bats

Executing a single test

In order to increase testing velocity, a wrapper script around Bats is available that can be used to run a single test case within a suite.

Tests within a suite may be listed by specifying the suite as a parameter to bats.

bats tests/unit/apps_1.bats

A single test can be specified via the --filter argument. The tests are selected via regex match, and all matches are executed.

bats --filter list tests/unit/apps_1.bats