{"id":51,"date":"2018-02-13T13:19:14","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T13:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/research-software-engineering\/?p=51"},"modified":"2019-06-11T12:39:23","modified_gmt":"2019-06-11T12:39:23","slug":"cloud-first-simple-automated-testing-using-drone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/research-software-engineering\/2018\/02\/13\/cloud-first-simple-automated-testing-using-drone\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloud-first: Simple automated testing using Drone"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the first in a series of posts<\/a> describing activities funded by our RSE Cloud Computing Award<\/a>. We are exploring the use of selected Microsoft Azure<\/a> services to accelerate the delivery of RSE projects via a cloud-first approach.<\/em><\/p>\n

A great way to explore an unfamiliar cloud platform is to deploy a familiar tool and compare the process with that used for an on-premise installation. In this case we’ll set up an open source continuous delivery system (Drone<\/a>) to carry out automated testing of a simple Python project hosted on GitHub. Drone is not as capable or flexible as alternatives like\u00a0Jenkins<\/a> (which we’ll consider in a subsequent post) but it’s a lot simpler and a suitable example of a self-contained webapp for our purposes of getting started with Azure.<\/p>\n

We’ll be automatically testing\u00a0this repository<\/a>, containing a trivial Python 3 project with a single test which can be run via python -m unittest<\/span>.\u00a0 We add a single YAML file<\/a> to the repository to configure Drone accordingly.<\/p>\n

There are then just three (short!) steps to get Drone testing the repository whenever code is pushed to GitHub. You don’t need anything except a web browser and an Azure account:<\/p>\n

1: Create an Azure VM where we’ll install Drone<\/strong><\/p>\n

You can do this via the Azure Portal<\/a>\u00a0but we’ll use the new\u00a0Azure Cloud Shell<\/a>\u00a0as it’s quicker – and easier to document, which is important for reproducibility. Drone is distributed as a Docker image so we’ll provision a minimal\u00a0Container Linux<\/a>\u00a0VM to host it. We need to create a resource group, add the VM, give it a public DNS name (you will need to choose your own, instead of my-ci-server<\/span>) and enable HTTP(S) access:<\/p>\n

az group create -l westeurope --name my-rg<\/pre>\n
az vm create --name my-ci-server --resource-group my-rg --image CoreOS:CoreOS:Stable:1632.2.1 --generate-ssh-keys --size Basic_A0<\/pre>\n
az network public-ip update --name my-ci-serverPublicIP --resource-group my-rg --dns-name my-ci-server<\/strong><\/pre>\n
az network nsg rule create --resource-group my-rg --nsg-name my-ci-serverNSG --name HTTP --destination-port-ranges 80 --priority 1010<\/pre>\n
az network nsg rule create --resource-group my-rg --nsg-name my-ci-serverNSG --name HTTPS --destination-port-ranges 443 --priority 1020<\/pre>\n
2: Register a new OAuth application in GitHub<\/strong><\/p>\n
In order to provide Drone with access to the repository (or repositories) we want to test, visit this page<\/a> and enter the following, replacing the hostname appropriately:<\/p>\n