In my last big project we had a nice, large test suite and the team was really good about always running it before most commits. But there were always problems with things that passed on one developer's machine and not the others (usually becuase of some files or changes that were not checked in). So I setup an automated smoke test that ran every night and emailed the results to the developers. I even made it nice and pretty using Test::TAP::HTMLMatrix
(mentioned here - http://use.perl.org/user/mpeters/journal/25612>).
This worked pretty well, but as always, it could be improved. These are some areas that needed improvement:
- It sent emails whether the test suite passed or not. While I like this (it let me know that the automated tests were still running) other developers just wanted to see the report when tests failed
- The report could be very, very large (5000+ tests and over 500k of HTML).
- There wasn't an easy way for developers to share test reports between themselves without pasting large chunks of test output into emails
- It was very tied to that specific project
This is why Smolder
was born. It solves the above problems in the following ways
- Developers choose when they want to receive emails. Either a) All the time b) just when there are failures, or even c) never.
- Developers can also choose what format their email comes in. It can either be the full HTML, or just a summary, or even just a link to the full report. Smolder contains the full report so it can always be viewed at any time.
- Test reports can be uploaded by either an autormated test setup, or individually by developers (in either XML or YAML using either Test::TAP::XML or YAML + Test::TAP::Model)
- It's a standalone server that's project agnostic. Plus one smolder install can host several projects. The only thing that needs to be adjusted for each project is to add Test::TAP::XML to the test harness.
Screen shots are available if you want to see it (just to make sure it's not too ugly).
Please try it out, give some feedback and request features. It's just at version 0.01 so it's future is very flexible.
Is there a non-root install
jmcada on 2006-03-06T17:38:27
I downloaded smolder and tried to get it running without root privledges. Is there a doc somewhere that tells how to do this?
Re:Is there a non-root install
mpeters on 2006-03-06T17:45:38
You have to have at least sudo privilege if you're running on a system privileged port. If you already have it installed, try editing your smolder.conf to change the ApachePort to something high, like 8080.
Currently you still need root MySQL privileges, but that's being changed as well.
