Windmill for JS Integration Tests

For integration testing that covers JS workflows, our tool of choice is Windmill.

Setting up Windmill

Windmill is included in the Launchpad source tree.

How is Windmill integrated?

There is a script called lp-windmill.py in the top-level directory. This is a wrapper around the windmill main script which starts a Launchpad server on port 8085 locally with a fresh database (including all of the standard tests sample data).

The windmill process is then fired off with the command line argument.

So if you want to run all the tests you'd typically use:

• $ ./lp-windmill.py -t lib/canonical/launchpad/windmill/tests firefox http://launchpad.dev:8085

  Note that it is not currently possible to run all the tests like that because of a bug/limitation in Windmill. You need to run each tests starting at the correct vhost. So for bugs tests, you'd use:

  $ ./lp-windmill.py -t lib/canonical/launchpad/windmill/tests/test_bugs firefox http://bugs.launchpad.dev:8085

  and for registry, you'd use:

  $ ./lp-windmill.py -t lib/canonical/launchpad/windmill/tests/test_registry firefox http://launchpad.dev:8085

For interactive test running and development, it's usually more convenient to run the Launchpad server separately:

• $ ./lp-windmill.py --server-only

The Windmill driver script, windmill.py, is located under the utilities/ directory. Using it, you can start an interactive shell and run the tests without the overhead of setting up and tearing down Launchpad.

• $ ./utilities/windmill.py shell firefox http://launchpad.dev:8085

That way you can restart windmill, without having to wait for the Launchpad restart cycle.

See the help page on the shell environment.

How are the tests organized

Tests written in python are rooted at lib/canonical/launchpad/windmill/tests.

Tests are divided by applications and then subdivided by workflows.

Tests using the JS API are in lib/canonical/launchpad/windmill/jstests.

External resources

• Windmill Book