[Spike] Ansible Molecule

[mmakow]

Molecule project is designed to aid in the development and testing of Ansible roles.

Molecule provides the following components:

• Dependency manager. Molecule uses galaxy by default to resolve your role dependencies.
• Driver provider. Molecule uses Docker by default. Molecule uses the driver to delegate the task of creating instances.
• Lint command. Molecule can call external commands to ensure that best practices are encouraged.
• Platforms definitions. Molecule relies on this to know which instances to create, name and to which group each instance belongs. It is possible to test your role against multiple popular distributions (CentOS, Fedora, Debian).
• Provisioner. Molecule only provides an Ansible provisioner. Ansible manages the life cycle of the instance based on this configuration.
• Scenario definition. Molecule relies on this configuration to control the scenario sequence order.
• Verifier framework. Molecule uses Ansible by default to provide a way to write specific state checking tests (such as deployment smoke tests) on the target instance.

Investigate if this could be useful https://molecule.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[atsikham]

As this is a spike, please consider other tools:

• Serverspec [1] [2] [3]
• Goss
• Rolespec
• Other?

[to-bar]

Our automated tests currently use Serverspec 😉 But it is for testing state of deployed VMs, At first glance, Goss seems to be similar but the example tests in yaml look really compact, simple and easy to write. IMO definitely worth to try! :star: Rolespec seems to have some Ansible related functionalities worth to check.

[mkyc]

This might be helpful site: https://github.com/ansible-community/molecule/discussions

[mkyc]

We need presentation from @atsikham in this area to make everyone more familiar with the topic.

[atsikham]

Output of this spike:

• Molecule tests for PostgreSQL apply part
• Demo - Molecule.pdf