Chocolatey Testing Environment

A testing environment setup similar to the package-verifier for testing packages. Over time this will add more Windows platforms for testing.

When creating packages or testing other parts of Chocolatey, this environment provides a good base for an independent testing minus any dependencies you may already have installed. It also allows you to completely destroy an environment and then just tear it down without worry about messing up something on your own system.

When creating packages, please review https://github.com/chocolatey/choco/wiki/CreatePackages

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• Setup
• Running Verification Manually
  • Preparing the Testing Environment
  • Testing a Package
  • Make Changes and Retest
  • Tearing Down the Testing Environment
• Differences Between This and Package Verifier Service
• Troubleshooting

Requirements

You need a computer with:

• a 64-bit processor and OS
• Intel VT-x enabled (usually not an issue if your computer is newer than 2011). This is necessary because we are using 64bit VMs.
• Hyper-V may need to be disabled for Virtualbox to work properly if your computer is a Windows box. NOTE: This may actually not be required.
• At least 10GB of free space.

Setup

To get started, ensure you have the following installed:

• Vagrant 1.8.1+ - linked clones is the huge reason here. You can technically use any version of Vagrant 1.3.5+. But you will get the best performance with 1.8.x+. It appears you can go up to Vagrant 2.1.5, but may have some issues with 2.2.2 and Windows guests (newer versions may be fine).
• Virtualbox 4.3.28+ - 5.2.20 (this flows in the selection of Vagrant - 5.2.22 seems to have some issues but newer versions may work fine)
• vagrant sahara plugin (vagrant plugin install sahara)

NOTE: If you decide to run with version 1.8.1 of Vagrant, you are going to need to set the VAGRANT_SERVER_URL environment variable as described in this forum post, otherwise, you will get an HTTP 404 error when attempting to download the base vagrant box used here.

Running Verification Manually

NOTE: The CDN for packages on https://chocolatey.org will only update every 30 minutes. This means if you just pushed an updated version, within 30 minutes from the last access time of the package it will be updated. This is why the validator and verifier wait for 31 minutes prior to testing a package.

Preparing the Testing Environment

1. Ensure setup above is good on your machine.
2. Fork and Clone this repository
3. Open a command line (PowerShell.exe/cmd.exe on Windows, bash everywhere else) and navigate to the root folder of the repository. You know you are in the right place when you do a dir or ls and Vagrantfile is in your path.

• No idea if bash on Windows (through Git/CygWin) is supported. If you run into issues, it is better to just use PowerShell.exe or cmd.exe. Please do not file issues stating it doesn't work.

1. Run vagrant up to prepare the machine for testing.

• Note due to the way that vagrant works, the first time that you run this command, the vagrant box named ferventcoder/win2012r2-x64-nocm needs to be downloaded from the Atlas website. This will take quite a while, and should only be attempted on a reasonably fast connection, that doesn't have any download limit restrictions. Once it has downloaded it will import the box and apply the scripts and configurations to the box as listed inside the Vagrantfile. You can find the downloaded box in the ~/.vagrant.d or c:\users\username\.vagrant.d folder.

1. Now the box is ready for you to start testing against.
2. Run the following command: vagrant sandbox on. This takes a snapshot of the VM using the vagrant plugin that was installed earlier. This means that after testing packages, the VM can be returned to this known "good" state.

Testing a Package

For testing a package, you have two avenues. For a locally built package, you can drop the package into the packages folder in the root of the cloned repository - it is shared with the box as C:\packages, so you can run a command on the box or with the inline provisioner (recommended as it is a closer match to the verifier) using --source c:\packages as an argument for installation. If you are trying to reproduce/investigate a problem with a package already up on the website, you can use --version number with your install arguments and that will let you install a package that is not listed (in most cases not yet approved).

1. Search the Vagrantfile for # THIS IS WHAT YOU CHANGE. Uncomment and edit the line which best meets the current situation that you are testing.
2. Run vagrant provision.
3. Watch the output and go to the box for further inspection if necessary.
4. If you need to change output or try something else, read the next section.

Make Changes and Retest

When you need to investigate making changes and rerunning the tests, remember that we took a snapshot of the vagrant machine (the virtual machine), so we can rollback to the earlier state each time and move forward with testing changes without the possibility of lingering artifacts. This is why we are using the sahara vagrant plugin, it allows us to take a snapshot and then revert the virtual machine back to the previous state.

When you are ready to reset to the state just before installing:

1. Run vagrant sandbox rollback
2. Follow the steps in testing a package (previous section).

Tearing Down the Testing Environment

NOTE: At any time you can:

• stop the box with vagrant suspend, vagrant halt
• delete the box with vagrant destroy

For more information on vagrant commands, see the Vagrant Docs

Differences Between This and Package Verifier Service

There are a couple of difference between the verifier service and this environment.

• The verifier is run without the GUI - meaning it is run in a headless state. There is no box to interact with.
• The verifier only runs against Windows 2012 R2 currently. This repo is adding more boxes as they become available.
• The verifier times out on waiting for a command after 12 minutes.
• Synced folders are different - the verifier syncs the .chocolatey folder to gather the package information files.
• Specific VM settings are different (for performance):
  • No GUI (as previously mentioned) - v.gui = false
  • 6GB RAM - v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", "6144"]
  • 4 CPUs - v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--cpus", "4"]
  • Clipboard disabled - v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--clipboard", "disabled"]
  • Drag and Drop disabled - v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--draganddrop", "disabled"]

Troubleshooting

You get this error: "A Vagrant environment or target machine is required to run this command. Run vagrant init to create a new Vagrant environment. Or, get an ID of a target machine from vagrant global-status to run this command on. A final option is to change to a directory with a Vagrantfile and to try again." - please ensure you are on the correct working directory (where this ReadMe and Vagrantfile is) of this repo and try again.