Day16 - Infrastructure Testing

This week I had a really impressive one-hour session about Docker & goss with Wolfram. At first, I have to say that I have very little experience with Docker. So far, I only used Docker a few times to run a database in a container to not "pollute" my local system configuration.

Wolfram explained me the most important Docker concepts and commands in a nutshell and then I was ready to get my hands dirty. The aim of our Docker session was to use goss in order to test Docker containers. goss is a little tool written in Go which allows us to validate a system (e.g. your local machine or a server) against a predefined specification described in a yaml-file. For example, Goss allows us to check if a specific tool is installed, if it has a specific configuration, or to check if a specific file exists on the machine. Since we didn't want to "pollute" our local systems with goss, we also decided to run goss in its own Docker container (which is known as dgoss).

In our session, we decided that we want to validate that a plain 'Linux Alpine' container has a specific version. This is of course not a super expressive test case, but we have started with baby steps so that I can build on this in the future.

I have to say that I didn't think much about testing Docker containers and was all the more amazed when I saw what possibilities there are. Wolfram also came up with the idea that one could make our Dockerfile setup a bit more generic and automatize it so that others had a simple way to reuse it for their containers and tests. I'm planning to setup a custom Docker image with Elixir soon and create some test specifications for that. Perhaps this helps me to find a way to create a more generic, automatized setup which then can be used easily for other projects and containers as well :-)

That's it for this week, see you on monday :-)