Umami distribution testing automation with Platform.sh and Diffy
One of the big things that drive Drupal 8 adoption is an easy ability to “try it out”. That is a fantastic Umami distribution project.
Lately, we were working on automating visual regression testing so maintainers have an easy way to check the patches.
The only thing that is needed right now is to copy patch’s URL, paste it into one of the test branches in GitHub project — and in 5–10 minutes you’ll get a report with all visual changes that this patch brings. And even more — visual testing covers both anonymous users view and an admin as well.
GitHub set up
The main repository is available at https://github.com/gareth-fivemile/umami-build.
As you could see it is fairly standard composer based Drupal setup.
Main logic resides in composer.json file. It uses latest Drupal 8.7 dev branch and whenever you like to test the patch there — you simply add it in “patches” section:
Platform.sh set up
Platform.sh has provided an account for testing purposes. Thanks to GitHub out of the box integration we have configured “tracking” three branches: master and three testing branches.
Once any commit lands (i.e. testing a patch) related Platform.sh environment gets rebuild. All logic resides in .platform.app.yaml file.
Here are the hooks that get triggered on each deployment
So you can see that we:
- reinstall the site from scratch by using umami distribution
- run cron
- set up some debugging information
- trigger visual regression testing
Visual regression testing with Diffy
The script that triggers visual regression testing jobs does a few things:
- gets all the credentials from Platform.sh variables
- checks if the current branch is master or one of the test branches
- if it is a master branch — simply create screenshots
- if it is a test branch — create screenshots and compare them with latest screenshots from master branch environment (production in terms of Diffy)
Once jobs are completed we send an email with notification. Also, the diff gets renamed based on the branch name. So it is easy to track what environment was tested and when.
As we are testing Umami with authenticated user — Diffy is configured to have two separate projects. The one that covers admin user tests layout builder URL only, but it can cover any other pages that need to be tested.
Security and passing variables from Platform.sh to Diffy
There was one very valid argument raised by Mark Conroy what about security? We do publish admin password in public GitHub repository.
The way we solved it is we have set up HTTP basic authentication in Platform.sh and passed credentials to our script that triggers jobs.
So then even with having GitHub repository open nobody without passwords would be able to access our builds and login.
Other use cases
Because this set up is general composer based site it is fairly easy to have it for other drupal projects / distributions. So you could test themes, modules or any other products that have some changes in UI that you’d like to track.
