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Application: smokey

Smoke tests for GOV.UK

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smokey
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#govuk-platform-engineering
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Utilities
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README

Smokey is a suite of Cucumber tests that probe GOV.UK frontend and backend publishing functionality. The tests use Selenium to automate a headless Chromium browser.

Smokey is run automatically:

  • every few minutes via a cronjob
  • by the deployment automation to determine whether to promote a release to the next environment (staging, production)

You can also start a Smokey run from Argo CD. Click the three dots in the ‘smokey’ cronjob and choose ‘Create Job’. It can take a few seconds for the job to appear.

Each test should check that a critical area of GOV.UK is working as expected. See the guidance on what tests belong here and how to write new ones.

Technical documentation

You can use the GOV.UK Docker environment to run the application and its tests with all the necessary dependencies. Follow the usage instructions to get started.

Use GOV.UK Docker to run any commands that follow.

Run the test suite from your machine

Read “Environment variables” for an explanation of the environment variables used in the examples below.

Run Smokey against Production:

ENVIRONMENT=production \
SIGNON_EMAIL="<email-address>" \
SIGNON_PASSWORD="<password>" \
bundle exec cucumber --profile=production

You can test integration or staging by changing the value of the ENVIRONMENT variable and profile argument (see profiles in config/cucumber.yml), but you need to be connected to the VPN.

You can run Smokey against the GOV.UK mirrors. The mirror tests are tagged @worksonmirror.

Run Smokey against the primary mirror:

ENVIRONMENT=production \
GOVUK_PROXY_PROFILE=mirrorS3 \
bundle exec cucumber --tags="@worksonmirror"

Run Smokey against the failover CDN:

ENVIRONMENT=production \
FAILOVER_CDN_HOST="<distribution>.cloudfront.net" \
GOVUK_PROXY_PROFILE=failoverCDN \
SIGNON_EMAIL="<email-address>" \
SIGNON_PASSWORD="<password>" \
bundle exec cucumber --tags="not @notproduction and not @notcloudfront"

Run the proxy in isolation

When running Smokey against the failover CDN or mirrors, Smokey automatically proxies all requests through GovukProxy. To help debug test failures, you can view pages through the proxy in your web browser. In each example below, visit http://127.0.0.1:8080 to see what the proxy is doing.

Proxy to the mirror:

GOVUK_PROXY_PROFILE=mirrorS3Replica ruby govuk_proxy_runner.rb

Proxy to the failover CDN:

FAILOVER_CDN_HOST="<distribution>.cloudfront.net" GOVUK_PROXY_PROFILE=failoverCDN ruby govuk_proxy_runner.rb

Debug mode (useful for confirming the host and headers you’ve set in govuk_proxy_profiles.rb are being applied):

GOVUK_PROXY_PROFILE=debug ruby govuk_proxy_runner.rb

Environment variables

You can use the following environment variables to configure the tests:

  • ENVIRONMENT: controls domains returned by Plek (see env.rb).

  • SIGNON_EMAIL and SIGNON_PASSWORD: credentials for a Signon user in $ENVIRONMENT. Smokey cannot use a Signon account which has multi-factor authentication enabled. To test against integration/staging from your machine, you can fetch the Signon credentials for the Smokey test user:

    k get secret smokey-signon-account -oyaml | yq .data.email | base64 -d
k get secret smokey-signon-account -oyaml | yq .data.password | base64 -d

  • RATE_LIMIT_TOKEN: (optional) a token used to bypass rate limiting if present on apps.

  • GOVUK_PROXY_PROFILE (optional) name of profile to use in govuk_proxy.rb. Must be one of failoverCDN, mirrorS3, mirrorS3Replica or mirrorGCS

  • FAILOVER_CDN_HOST (optional) required if GOVUK_PROXY_PROFILE=failoverCDN. Should be of the form <distribution>.cloudfront.net. Replace <distribution> with the CloudFront hostname in govuk-dns-tf.

Further documentation

Licence

MIT License