Writing Kuttl Scorecard Tests

This guide outlines the steps which can be followed to implement scorecard tests using the kuttl project and specifically the scorecard kuttl test image.

Defining kuttl Tests in Scorecard

Scorecard users can include kuttl tests within their operator bundles as follows:

$ tree ./bundle
./bundle
├── manifests
│   ├── cache.example.com_memcacheds_crd.yaml
│   └── memcached-operator.clusterserviceversion.yaml
├── metadata
│   └── annotations.yaml
└── tests
    └── scorecard
        ├── config.yaml
        └── kuttl
            ├── kuttl-test.yaml
            └── list-pods
                ├── 00-assert.yaml
                └── 00-pod.yaml
            └── list-other
                ├── 00-assert.yaml
                └── 00-pod.yaml
  • bundle/ - Contains bundle manifests and metadata under test.
  • bundle/tests/scorecard/config.yaml - Configuration yaml to define and run scorecard tests.
  • bundle/tests/scorecard/kuttl - Contains tests written for kuttl to execute
  • bundle/tests/scorecard/kuttl/kuttl-test.yaml - Contains the kuttl configuration, it is here that you would add any kuttl specific configuration settings that you might require.
  • bundle/tests/scorecard/kuttl/list-pods - Contains a kuttl test case
  • bundle/tests/scorecard/kuttl/list-pods/00-assert.yaml - Contains a kuttl test case assert
  • bundle/tests/scorecard/kuttl/list-pods/00-pod.yaml - Contains a kuttl test case step
  • bundle/tests/scorecard/kuttl/list-other - Contains another kuttl test case

When the scorecard kuttl binary is executed, it will process all the test cases under the scorecard/kuttl directory within the bundle contents.

Configuring kuttl Tests in the Scorecard Configuration

In the scorecard configuration file, you might have the following definition of what the selector suite=kuttlsuite will translate to:

stages:
- tests:
  - image: quay.io/operator-framework/scorecard-test-kuttl:v2.0.0
    labels:
      suite: kuttlsuite
      test: kuttltest1

This test configuration will execute the scorecard-test-kuttl image which executes kuttl. The kuttl output is translated into scorecard compliant output which is displayed back to the end user along with any other test results.

With the above kuttl test configuration, you can execute that kuttl test using scorecard as follows:

operator-sdk scorecard <bundle_dir_or_image> --selector=suite=kuttlsuite

Defining kuttl Specific Configuration Options

The kuttl configuration file is documented within the kuttl project.

An example of the kuttl configuration file is as follows:

apiVersion: kudo.dev/v1beta1
kind: TestSuite
parallel: 4
timeout: 120
startControlPlane: false

The important fields to note here are:

  • startControlPlane - Set to false since scorecard assumes it is running within a control plane already.

Other kuttl configurations settings are available for more advanced kuttl use cases. See kuttl configuration for more details on kuttl configuration.

kuttl Tests Explained

The kuttl test tool looks for tests to execute within the bundle following a naming convention as follows:

        └── kuttl
            ├── kuttl-test.yaml
            └── list-pods
                ├── 00-assert.yaml
                └── 00-pod.yaml
            └── list-other
                ├── 00-assert.yaml
                └── 00-pod.yaml

The important fields to note here are:

  • kuttl-test.yaml - The name required for your kuttl configuration file.
  • list-pods, list-other - The names given by you for these test cases.
  • 00-assert.yaml - The assert file is executed to test whether or not the test was successful, this assertion determines whether or not the test passed or failed.
  • 00-pod.yaml - The pod file is used to define what the test will create, in this case a pod will be created based on the manifest within 00-pod.yaml.

The number in front of the assert and pod manifests is used to determine the order in which kuttl will execute the files.

See kuttl tests for a detailed description of how kuttl tests are named and executed.

kuttl Test Privileges

The kuttl tests a user might write can vary widely in functionality and in particular require special Kubernetes RBAC privileges outside of what the default service account for a namespace might have. It is therefore very likely you will be required to run scorecard in a custom service account that holds the required RBAC permissions, like config/rbac/service_account.yaml in Go operator projects. You can specify a custom service account in scorecard as follows:

$ operator-sdk scorecard <bundle_dir_or_image> --service-account=my-project-controller-manager

Also, you can specify a non-default namespace that scorecard will run in:

$ operator-sdk scorecard <bundle_dir_or_image> --namespace=my-project-system

If you do not specify either of these flags, the default namespace and service account will be used by the scorecard to run test pods.

It is worth noting that scorecard-test-kuttl specifies a namespace to the kubectl-kuttl command which causes kuttl to not create a namespace for each test. This might impact your kuttl tests in that you might need to perform resource cleanup in your tests instead of depending upon namespace deletion to perform that cleanup.

Also of note is that in our example kuttl configuration file, we add the suppressLog: events setting which means that kuttl will not log kubernetes events and thereby means you do not have to provide RBAC access for reading kubernetes events to the service account used to run kuttl tests.