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Testing collections

Testing your collection ensures that your code works well and integrates well with the rest of the Ansible ecosystem. Your collection should pass the sanity tests for Ansible code. You should also add unit tests to cover the code in your collection and integration tests to cover the interactions between your collection and ansible-core.

Testing tools 

The main tool for testing collections is ansible-test, Ansible’s testing tool described in Testing Ansible and provided by both the ansible and ansible-core packages.

You can run several sanity tests, as well as run unit and integration tests for plugins using ansible-test. When you test collections, test against the ansible-core version(s) you are targeting.

You must always execute ansible-test from the root directory of a collection. You can run ansible-test in Docker containers without installing any special requirements. The Ansible team uses this approach in Azure Pipelines both in the ansible/ansible GitHub repository and in the large community collections such as community.general and community.network to automatically run the tests when pull requests are submitted.

Many collections which do not require running tests on different OS distributions use GitHub Actions as their continuous integration (CI) platform. The collection_template repository contains GitHub Actions workflow templates that collection developers are free to use to easily set up CI in their collection repositories.

The examples below demonstrate running tests in Docker containers.

Sanity tests 

To run all sanity tests:

ansible-test sanity --docker default -v

See Sanity Tests for more information. See the full list of sanity tests for details on the sanity tests and how to fix identified issues.

Adding unit tests 

You must place unit tests in the appropriate tests/unit/plugins/ directory. For example, you would place tests for plugins/module_utils/foo/bar.py in tests/unit/plugins/module_utils/foo/test_bar.py or tests/unit/plugins/module_utils/foo/bar/test_bar.py. For examples, see the unit tests in community.general.

To run all unit tests for all supported Python versions:

ansible-test units --docker default -v

To run all unit tests only for a specific Python version:

ansible-test units --docker default -v --python 3.6

To run only a specific unit test:

ansible-test units --docker default -v --python 3.6 tests/unit/plugins/module_utils/foo/test_bar.py

You can specify Python requirements in the tests/unit/requirements.txt file. See Unit Tests for more information, especially on fixture files.

Adding integration tests 

You must place integration tests in the appropriate tests/integration/targets/ directory. For module integration tests, you can use the module name alone. For example, you would place integration tests for plugins/modules/foo.py in a directory called tests/integration/targets/foo/. For non-module plugin integration tests, you must add the plugin type to the directory name. For example, you would place integration tests for plugins/connections/bar.py in a directory called tests/integration/targets/connection_bar/. For lookup plugins, the directory must be called lookup_foo, for inventory plugins, inventory_foo, and so on.

You can write two different kinds of integration tests:

Ansible role tests run with ansible-playbook and validate various aspects of the module. They can depend on other integration tests (usually named prepare_bar or setup_bar, which prepare a service or install a requirement named bar in order to test module foo) to set-up required resources, such as installing required libraries or setting up server services.
runme.sh tests run directly as scripts. They can set up inventory files, and execute ansible-playbook or ansible-inventory with various settings.

For examples, see the integration tests in community.general. See also Integration tests for more details.

Since integration tests can install requirements, and set-up, start and stop services, we recommended running them in docker containers or otherwise restricted environments whenever possible. By default, ansible-test supports Docker images for several operating systems. See the list of supported docker images for all options. Use the default image mainly for platform-independent integration tests, such as those for cloud modules. The following examples use the fedora35 image.

To execute all integration tests for a collection:

ansible-test integration --docker fedora35 -v

If you want more detailed output, run the command with -vvv instead of -v. Alternatively, specify --retry-on-error to automatically re-run failed tests with higher verbosity levels.

To execute only the integration tests in a specific directory:

ansible-test integration --docker fedora35 -v connection_bar

You can specify multiple target names. Each target name is the name of a directory in tests/integration/targets/.

Testing collections

Testing tools

Sanity tests

Adding unit tests

Adding integration tests

Testing tools 

Sanity tests 

Adding unit tests 

Adding integration tests 