End-to-end testing
How to integrate third-party CI platforms with Release to do end-to-end testing
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.
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.
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_ID: ${{ secrets.RELEASE_ACCOUNT_ID }}
RELEASE_APP_ID: ${{ secrets.RELEASE_APP_ID }}
RELEASE_LOGIN: ${{ secrets.RELEASE_LOGIN }}
RELEASE_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.RELEASE_TOKEN }}
jobs:
build_and_upload:
name: Build and upload docker image
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- shell: bash
run: |
echo "building docker image..."
echo "uploading docker image..."
mkdir tmp
echo "232490755822.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/awesome-release/react-express-mongodb/backend:main" > tmp/backend_image.txt
echo "232490755822.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/awesome-release/react-express-mongodb/frontend:main" > tmp/frontend_image.txt
- name: upload image name
uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
with:
name: images
path: tmp/
The next job we define is
create_environment
, and this is where most of the Release-specific configuration needs to be. We pull a Docker image that includes the Release CLI and use it to create a new Release environment. We use the Release Account ID and Release Application ID defined earlier, pulled from our GitHub Secrets.We also define a concurrency expression to prevent multiple jobs from running at once, in case commits come in close to each other.
create_environment:
name: Create release environment
needs: build_and_upload
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
concurrency: ci-${{ 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=$BACKEND_IMAGE" \
--output json \
--wait > res.json
- name: upload image name
uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
with:
name: json
path: res.json
Now that we have the environment, we can run the tests. We'll call the next job
run_e2e_tests
. It should look as follows: run_e2e_tests:
name: run e2e tests
needs: create_environment
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: checkout repository
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: download artifacts
uses: actions/download-artifact@v3
with:
name: json
- name: create release environment
shell: bash
run: |
echo "Install dependencies and run E2E tests..."
FRONTEND_URL=$(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: $backendUrl }' > cypress.env.json
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libgbm-dev libnotify-dev libgconf-2-4 libnss3 libxss1 libasound2 libxtst6 xauth xvfb
npm install
npm run cy:run
Note that you'll need to change the command to install the dependencies you need and run your own tests in this step.
Our last job is to clean up the Release environment once the tests have run. We call the job
delete_environment
and it uses the Release CLI image. The delete_environment
job needs access to your Release Account ID, App ID, and the Environment ID that was created in the previous step. delete_environment:
name: Delete release environment
needs: run_e2e_tests
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
container: public.ecr.aws/b4g8c3s2/release-cli
steps:
- name: checkout repository
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: download artifacts
uses: actions/download-artifact@v3
with:
name: json
- name: delete release environment
shell: bash
run: |
echo "Delete the Release environment..."
ENVIRONMENT_ID=$(jq -r '.environment.id' res.json)
release environments delete "$ENVIRONMENT_ID" \
--account "$RELEASE_ACCOUNT_ID" \
--app "$RELEASE_APP_ID"
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.
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/*
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/*
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: $backendUrl }' > cypress.env.json
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libgbm-dev libnotify-dev libgconf-2-4 libnss3 libxss1 libasound2 libxtst6 xauth xvfb
npm install
npm run cy:run
Note that you'll need to change the command to install the dependencies you need and run your own tests in this step.
Our last job is to clean up the Release environment once the tests have run. We'll call the job
delete-release-environment
, and it uses the Release CLI image and needs access to your Release Account ID, App ID, and the Environment ID that was created in the previous step. delete-release-environment:
docker:
- image: public.ecr.aws/b4g8c3s2/release-cli
steps:
- attach_workspace:
at: ./
- run:
name: Delete Release Environment
command: |
ENVIRONMENT_ID=$(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
Last modified 1mo ago