End-to-end testing

How to integrate third-party CI platforms with Release to do end-to-end testing

(Skip directly to Configure GitHub Actions or Configure CircleCI.)

If you have end-to-end (E2E) tests set up on a platform like GitHub actions or CircleCI, you can configure these tests to run in an ephemeral Release environment. The flow will be:

1. Create a new Release environment.

2. Run the E2E tests in this new environment.

3. Destroy the environment.

Running E2E tests in an ephemeral environment ensures that they run on a "clean slate", which gives you confidence that tests do not rely on any unknown state that might exist in a long-running environment. Testing in an ephemeral environment also reduces costs because the environment is destroyed as soon as it's no longer needed.

Configuring GitHub Actions for E2E testing with Release

To integrate Release with GitHub Actions and run end-to-end tests, you can structure your GitHub Action main.yml file into four jobs:

1. Build and upload the image.

2. Create the Release environment.

3. Run E2E tests.

4. Delete the Release environment.

We'll cover an example of how to do each step below. If you prefer, you can find the entire example config file in our example React, Express, and MongoDB application on GitHub.

Building and uploading your tests as a Docker image

Our first job, build-and-upload, will build and upload the image of our application to test or (as in the example below) fetch the images from a registry. Our example has a backend and a frontend as separate images, so we'll fetch each of those and save them to a temporary directory. We use the latest Ubuntu image from GitHub for this.

We also have some standard GitHub Actions boilerplate to define the credentials we need and define the trigger.

name: GitHub Actions E2E Testing Demo

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - demo/github-actions

env:
  RELEASE_ACCOUNT: ${{ secrets.RELEASE_ACCOUNT }}
  RELEASE_APP_ID: ${{ secrets.RELEASE_APP_ID }}
  RELEASE_LOGIN: ${{ secrets.RELEASE_LOGIN }}
  RELEASE_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.RELEASE_TOKEN }}

jobs:
  build_and_upload:
    name: Build and upload docker image
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - shell: bash
        run: |
          echo "building docker image..."
          echo "uploading docker image..."
          mkdir tmp
          echo "232490755822.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/awesome-release/react-express-mongodb/backend:main" > tmp/backend_image.txt
          echo "232490755822.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/awesome-release/react-express-mongodb/frontend:main" > tmp/frontend_image.txt
      - name: upload image name
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
        with:
          name: images
          path: tmp/

Creating the Release environment

The next job we define is create_environment, and this is where most of the Release-specific configuration needs to be. We pull a Docker image that includes the Release CLI and use it to create a new Release environment. We use the Release Account ID and Release Application ID defined earlier, pulled from our GitHub Secrets.

We also define a concurrency expression to prevent multiple jobs from running at once, in case commits come in close to each other.

  create_environment:
    name: Create release environment
    needs: build_and_upload
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    concurrency: ci-${{ github.ref }}
    container: public.ecr.aws/b4g8c3s2/release-cli
    steps:
      - name: download artifacts
        uses: actions/download-artifact@v3
        with:
          name: images
      - name: create release environment
        shell: bash
        run: |
          BRANCH=e2e-testing
          FRONTEND_IMAGE=$(cat frontend_image.txt)
          BACKEND_IMAGE=$(cat backend_image.txt)
          FRONTEND=frontend
          BACKEND=backend
          release environments create \
            --account "$RELEASE_ACCOUNT_ID" \
            --app "$RELEASE_APP_ID" \
            --branch "$BRANCH" \
            --image-overrides "$FRONTEND=$FRONTEND_IMAGE" \
            --image-overrides "$BACKEND=$BACKEND_IMAGE" \
            --output json \
            --wait > res.json
      - name: upload image name
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
        with:
          name: json
          path: res.json

Running the E2E tests

Now that we have the environment, we can run the tests. We'll call the next job run_e2e_tests. It should look as follows:

  run_e2e_tests:
    name: run e2e tests
    needs: create_environment
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: download artifacts
        uses: actions/download-artifact@v3
        with:
          name: json
      - name: create release environment
        shell: bash
        run: |
          echo "Install dependencies and run E2E tests..."
          FRONTEND_URL=$(jq -r '.environment.hostnames | .[] | select(.target=="frontend").hostname' res.json)
          BACKEND_URL=$(jq -r '.environment.hostnames | .[] | select(.target=="backend").hostname' res.json)
          jq -n --arg baseUrl "https://$FRONTEND_URL" '{ baseUrl: $baseUrl }' > cypress.json
          jq -n --arg backendUrl "https://$BACKEND_URL" '{ backendUrl: $backendUrl }' > cypress.env.json
          sudo apt-get update
          sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libgbm-dev libnotify-dev libgconf-2-4 libnss3 libxss1 libasound2 libxtst6 xauth xvfb
          npm install
          npm run cy:run

Note that you'll need to change the command to install the dependencies you need and run your own tests in this step.

Destroying the Release environment

Our last job is to clean up the Release environment once the tests have run. We call the job delete_environment and it uses the Release CLI image. The delete_environment job needs access to your Release Account ID, App ID, and the Environment ID that was created in the previous step.

  delete_environment:
    name: Delete release environment
    needs: run_e2e_tests
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    container: public.ecr.aws/b4g8c3s2/release-cli
    steps:
      - name: checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: download artifacts
        uses: actions/download-artifact@v3
        with:
          name: json
      - name: delete release environment
        shell: bash
        run: |
          echo "Delete the Release environment..."
          ENVIRONMENT_ID=$(jq -r '.environment.id' res.json)
          release environments delete "$ENVIRONMENT_ID" \
            --account "$RELEASE_ACCOUNT_ID" \
            --app "$RELEASE_APP_ID"

Configuring CircleCI for E2E testing with Release

To integrate Release with CircleCI and run end-to-end tests, you can structure your CircleCI config.yml file into four jobs:

1. Build and upload the image.

2. Create the Release environment.

3. Run E2E tests.

4. Delete the Release environment.

We'll cover an example of how to do each step below. If you prefer, you can find the entire example config file as part of our example React, Express, and MongoDB application on GitHub.

Building and uploading your tests as a Docker image

Our first job, build-and-upload-image, will build the image of our application to test or (as in the example below), fetch these images from a registry. Our example has a backend and a frontend as separate images, so we'll fetch each of those and save them to a temporary directory. We use a Node image from CircleCI to run this.

We also have some standard CircleCI boilerplate to specify the target version.

version: 2.1

jobs:
  # In this example, we are not actually building and pushing docker image
  build-and-upload-image:
    docker:
      - image: circleci/node:13.8.0
    steps:
      - run:
          name: Build and push docker image
          command: |
            mkdir tmp
            echo "Building docker image..."
            echo "Push docker image..."
            echo "232490755822.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/awesome-release/react-express-mongodb/backend:main" > tmp/backend_image.txt
            echo "232490755822.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/awesome-release/react-express-mongodb/frontend:main" > tmp/frontend_image.txt
      - persist_to_workspace:
          root: .
          paths:
            - tmp/*

Creating the Release environment

The next job we define is create-release-environment, and this is where most of the Release-specific configuration needs to be. We pull a Docker image that includes the Release CLI and use it to create a new Release Environment. For this to work, you'll need to make sure your Release Account ID and Release Application ID are in the appropriate environment variables.

  create-release-environment:
    docker:
      - image: public.ecr.aws/b4g8c3s2/release-cli
    steps:
      - attach_workspace:
          at: ./
      - run:
          name: Create a new Release environment
          command: |
            BRANCH=demo/circleci
            FRONTEND_IMAGE=$(cat tmp/frontend_image.txt)
            BACKEND_IMAGE=$(cat tmp/backend_image.txt)
            FRONTEND=frontend
            BACKEND=backend
            release environments create \
              --account "$RELEASE_ACCOUNT_ID" \
              --app "$RELEASE_APP_ID" \
              --branch "$BRANCH" \
              --image-overrides "$FRONTEND=$FRONTEND_IMAGE" \
              --image-overrides "$BACKEND=$BACKEND_IMAGE" \
              --output json \
              --wait > tmp/res.json
      - persist_to_workspace:
          root: .
          paths:
            - tmp/*

Running the E2E tests

Now that we have the environment, we can run the tests. We'll call the next job run-e2e-tests. It should look as follows:

 run-e2e-tests:
    docker:
      - image: circleci/node:13.8.0
    steps:
      - checkout
      - attach_workspace:
          at: ./
      - run:
          name: Run E2E Tests
          command: |
            echo "Install dependencies and run E2E tests..."
            FRONTEND_URL=$(jq -r '.environment.hostnames | .[] | select(.target=="frontend").hostname' tmp/res.json)
            BACKEND_URL=$(jq -r '.environment.hostnames | .[] | select(.target=="backend").hostname' tmp/res.json)
            jq -n --arg baseUrl "https://$FRONTEND_URL" '{ baseUrl: $baseUrl }' > cypress.json
            jq -n --arg backendUrl "https://$BACKEND_URL" '{ backendUrl: $backendUrl }' > cypress.env.json
            sudo apt-get update
            sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libgbm-dev libnotify-dev libgconf-2-4 libnss3 libxss1 libasound2 libxtst6 xauth xvfb
            npm install
            npm run cy:run

Note that you'll need to change the command to install the dependencies you need and run your own tests in this step.

Destroying the Release environment

Our last job is to clean up the Release environment once the tests have run. We'll call the job delete-release-environment, and it uses the Release CLI image and needs access to your Release Account ID, App ID, and the Environment ID that was created in the previous step.

  delete-release-environment:
    docker:
      - image: public.ecr.aws/b4g8c3s2/release-cli
    steps:
      - attach_workspace:
          at: ./
      - run:
          name: Delete Release Environment
          command: |
            ENVIRONMENT_ID=$(jq -r '.environment.id' tmp/res.json)
            release environments delete "$ENVIRONMENT_ID" \
              --account "$RELEASE_ACCOUNT_ID" \
              --app "$RELEASE_APP_ID"

Finally, we connect all of the jobs into a workflow as follows:

workflows:
  my_workflow:
    jobs:
      - build-and-upload-image:
          filters:
            branches:
              only: demo/circleci
      - create-release-environment:
          requires: [build-and-upload-image]
          filters:
            branches:
              only: demo/circleci
      - run-e2e-tests:
          requires: [create-release-environment]
          filters:
            branches:
              only: demo/circleci
      - delete-release-environment:
          requires: [run-e2e-tests]
          filters:
            branches:
              only: demo/circleci