Faster module tests with Facter 4 and rspec-puppet

• facter

  7 613 9.2 Ruby

  Collect and display system facts

  

The latest major version of Facter—Puppet's tool for collecting system information—has been out for some time now. However, we've been hard at work fixing bugs ever since. The fact that Facter has to be able to run on a variety of operating systems and architectures makes maintenance quite a challenging ordeal.

• facterdb

  2 42 7.0 Ruby

  A Database of OS facts provided by Facter

  

For each test, rspec-puppet stubs the fake facts using the custom facts API. The fake facts it gets from facterdb, which is a gem that contains "dummy" facts for a variety of operating systems and Facter versions—basically lots of files containing facter --json output. The resulting information is then fed to Puppet for catalog compilation.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• Puppet

  3 7,277 9.8 Ruby

  Server automation framework and application

  

We started by decoupling Puppet from Facter as much as we could, introducing the possibility of having multiple Facter backends. While Puppet would use the default Facter implementation when running on its own, external users would be able to define and pass their own Facter implementation when initializing Puppet, similar to how puppetserver configures Puppet to use its JRuby-compliant HTTP client.

• rspec-puppet

  1 10 8.1 Ruby

  RSpec tests for your Puppet manifests

  

To avoid breaking the Facter API, we ended up implementing an overcomplicated way of interacting with a hash. Using our dumb Facter backend, custom facts were now simply added to a hash, and querying them would just produce them from the hash if available:

• kmo-501-nginx

  1 0 0.0 Ruby

  A mock nginx module for training

  

And because performance improvements mean nothing without showing the numbers, here's how test times have changed for the puppet-nginx module:

• puppet-nginx

  1 0 0.0

  Puppet Module to manage NGINX on various UNIXes (by GabrielNagy)

One thing I haven't mentioned is that running the same tests with Puppet 6 takes a total of 25 minutes, so there's more to improve in Puppet itself as well. However, from a Facter standpoint it's impossible to make the tests any faster, unless Ruby itself improves hash access speed 😜.

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