Archivematica Automated User Acceptance Tests (AMAUAT)

This repository contains automated user acceptance tests for Archivematica (AM) written using the Python behave library and the Gherkin language. Using Gherkin to express tests makes them readable to a wide range of Archivematica users and stakeholders¹. Consider the following snippet from the PREMIS events feature file (premis-events.feature):

Feature: PREMIS events are recorded correctly
  Users of Archivematica want to be sure that the steps taken by
  Archivematica are recorded correctly in the resulting METS file, according
  to the PREMIS specification.

  Scenario: Isla wants to confirm that standard PREMIS events are created
    Given that the user has ensured that the default processing config is in its default state
    When a transfer is initiated on directory ~/archivematica-sampledata/SampleTransfers/BagTransfer
    Then in the METS file there are/is 7 PREMIS event(s) of type ingestion

The Given, When and Then statements in the feature files allow us to put the system into a known state, perform user actions, and then make assertions about the expected outcomes, respectively. These steps are implemented by step functions in Python modules located in the features/steps/ directory, which, in turn, may interact with Archivematica GUIs and APIs by calling methods of an ArchivematicaUser instance as defined in the amuser package. For detailed guidance on adding feature files, implementing steps, or adding AM user abilities, please see the Developer documentation. For examples of using these tests to run (performance) experiments on Archivematica, see Running Experiments with the AMAUAT.

Table of Contents

• High-level overview
• Installation
• Usage

High-level overview

The AMAUAT are a completely separate application from Archivematica (AM) and the Archivematica Storage Service (SS). They require that you already have an Archivematica instance deployed somewhere that you can test against (see Installing Archivematica.) The tests must be supplied with configuration details, including crucially the URLs of the AM and SS instances as well as valid usernames and passwords for authenticating to those instances. The AM instance being tested may be running locally on the same machine or remotely on an external server. Note that running all of the AMAUAT tests to completion will likely take more than one hour and will result in several transfers, SIPs, and AIPs being created in the AM instance that is being tested.

The tests use the Selenium WebDriver to launch a web browser in order to interact with Archivematica's web interfaces. Therefore, you may need to install a web browser (Chrome or Firefox) and the appropriate Selenium drivers; see the Browsers, drivers and displays section for details.

Installation

This section describes how to install the AMAUAT. If you have done this before and just need a refresher, see the Installation quickstart. If you are installing manually for the first time, see the Detailed installation instructions. If you are testing a local Archivematica deploy created using deploy-pub (Vagrant/Ansible), then you can configure that system to install these tests for you: see the Install with deploy-pub sections. If you are testing a local deploy created using am (Docker Compose), then the tests should be installed for you automatically.

Installation quickstart

The following list of commands illustrates the bare minimum required in order to install and run the tests. Note that a real-world invocation of the behave command will require the addition of flags that are particular to your environment and the details of the Archivematica instance that you are testing against (see Usage). If you have never run these tests before, please read the Detailed installation instructions first.

$ virtualenv -p python3 env
$ source env/bin/activate
$ git clone https://github.com/artefactual-labs/archivematica-acceptance-tests.git
$ cd archivematica-acceptance-tests
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ behave

Detailed installation instructions

To install these tests manually, first create a virtual environment using Python 3 and activate it:

$ virtualenv -p python3 env
$ source env/bin/activate

Then clone the source:

$ git clone https://github.com/artefactual-labs/archivematica-acceptance-tests.git

Since lxml is a dependency, you may need to install python3-dev. On Ubuntu 14.04 with Python 3 the following command should work:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-dev

Finally, install the Python dependencies:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Install with deploy-pub

Archivematica's public Vagrant/Ansible deployment tool deploy-pub allows you to install the AMAUAT when provisioning your virtual machine (VM). This simply requires setting the archivematica_src_install_acceptance_tests variable to "yes" in the Ansible playbook's vars- file, e.g., vars-singlenode-qa.yml.

Browsers, drivers and displays

A web browser (Firefox or Chrome) must be installed on the system where the tests are being run. On a typical desktop computer this is usually not a problem. However, on a development or CI server, this may require extra installation steps. You will need to consult the appropriate documentation for installing Firefox or Chrome on your particular platform.

If you are using Chrome to run the tests, you will need to install the Selenium Chrome driver. Instructions for installing the Selenium Chrome driver on Ubuntu 14.04 are copied below:

wget -N http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/2.26/chromedriver_linux64.zip
unzip chromedriver_linux64.zip
chmod +x chromedriver
sudo mv -f chromedriver /usr/local/share/chromedriver
sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/chromedriver /usr/local/bin/chromedriver
sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/chromedriver /usr/bin/chromedriver

When the tests are running, they will open and close several browser windows. This can be annoying when you are trying to use your computer at the same time for other tasks. On the other hand, if you are running the tests on a virtual machine or a server, chances are that that machine will not have a display and you will require a headless display manager. The recommended way to run the tests headless is with TightVNC. To install TightVNC on Ubuntu 14.04:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install -y tightvncserver

Before running the tests, start the VNC server on display port 42 and tell the terminal session to use that display port:

$ tightvncserver -geometry 1920x1080 :42
$ export DISPLAY=:42

Note that the first time you run this command, TightVNC server will ask you to provide a password so that you can connect to the server with a VNC viewer, if desired. If you do want to connect to the VNC session to see the tests running in real-time, use a VNC viewer to connect to display port 42 of the IP of the VM that is running the tests. As an example, if you are using the xtightvncviewer application on Ubuntu (sudo apt-get install xtightvncviewer), you could run the following command to view the tests running on a local machine at IP 192.168.168.192:

$ xtightvncviewer 192.168.168.192:42

Installing Archivematica

As mentioned previously, running the AMAUAT requires having an existing Archivematica instance installed. While describing how to do this is beyond the scope of this document, there are several well-documented ways of installing Archivematica, with the Docker Compose strategy being the recommended method for development. See the following links:

• Docker Compose Archivematica installation
• Vagrant/Ansible Archivematica installation
• Manual Archivematica installation

Usage

Simply executing the behave command will run all of the tests and will use the default URLs and authentication strings as defined in features/environment.py. However, in the typical case you will need to provide Behave with some configuration details that are appropriate to your environment and which target a specific subset of tests (i.e., feature files or scenarios). The following command is a more realistic example of running the AMAUAT:

$ behave \
    --tags=icc \
    --no-skipped \
    -v \
    --stop \
    -D am_version=1.7 \
    -D home=archivematica \
    -D transfer_source_path=archivematica/archivematica-sampledata/TestTransfers/acceptance-tests \
    -D driver_name=Firefox \
    -D am_url=http://127.0.0.1:62080/ \
    -D am_username=test \
    -D am_password=test \
    -D ss_url=http://127.0.0.1:62081/ \
    -D ss_username=test \
    -D ss_password=test

The command given above is interpreted as follows.

• The --tags=icc flag tells Behave that we only want to run the Ingest Conformance Check feature as defined in the features/core/ingest-mkv-conformance.feature file, which has the @icc tag.
• The --no-skipped flag indicates that we do not want the output to be cluttered with information about the other tests (feature files) that we are skipping in this run.
• The -v flag indicates that we want verbose output, i.e., that we want any print statements to appear in stdout.
• The --stop flag tells Behave to stop running the tests as soon as there is a single failure.
• The rest of the -D-style flags are Behave user data:
  • -D am_version=1.7 tells the tests that we are targeting an Archivematica version 1.7 instance.
  • The -D home=archivematica flag indicates that when the user clicks the Browse button in Archivematica's Transfer tab, the top-level folder for all ~/-prefixed transfer source paths in the feature files should be archivematica/.
  • The -D transfer_source_path=... flag indicates that when the user clicks the Browse button in Archivematica's Transfer tab, the top-level folder for all relative transfer source paths in the feature files should be archivematica/archivematica-sampledata/TestTransfers/acceptance-tests/.
  • The -D driver_name=Firefox flag tells Behave to use the Firefox browser.
  • Finally, the remaining user data flags provide Behave with the URLs and authentication details of particular AM and SS instances.

To see all of the Behave user data flags that the AMAUAT recognizes, inspect the get_am_user function of the features/environment.py module.

To run all tests that match any of a set of tags, separate the tags by commas. For example, the following will run all of the Ingest Conformance Check (icc) and Ingest Policy Check (ipc) tests:

$ behave --tags=icc,ipc

To run all tests that match all of a set of tags, use separate --tags flags for each tag. For example, the following will run only the preservation scenario of the Ingest Conformance Check feature:

$ behave --tags=icc --tags=preservation

In addition to the general guidance just provided, all of the feature files in the features/ directory should contain comments clearly indicating how they should be executed and whether they need any special configuration (flags).

Closing all units

There are two shell scripts that use the AMAUAT test functionality to close all units (i.e., transfers or ingests). These scripts call behave internally (targeting specific feature tags) and will therefore accept the same flags as behave itself (e.g., for specifying the AM url); the basic method for executing these scripts is by running:

$ ./close_all_transfers.sh
$ ./close_all_ingests.sh

Troubleshooting

If the tests generate cannot allocate memory errors, there may be unclosed browsers windows. Run the following command to look for persistent Firefox or Chrome browsers and kill them:

$ ps --sort -rss -eo rss,pid,command | head

Logging

All log messages are written to a file named AMAUAT.log in the root directory. Passing the --no-logcapture flag to behave will cause all of the log messages to also be written to stdout.

Timeouts and attempt counters

At various points, these tests wait for fixed periods of time or attempt to perform some action a fixed number of times before giving up the attempt. The variables holding these wait and attempt values are listed with their defaults in features/environment.py, e.g., MAX_DOWNLOAD_AIP_ATTEMPTS. If you find that tests are failing because of timeouts being exceeded, or conversely that tests that should be failing are waiting too long for an event that will never happen, you can modify these wait and attempt values using behave user data flags, e.g., -D max_download_aip_attempts=200.

---

1. The Gherkin syntax and the approach of defining features by describing user behaviours came out of the behavior-driven development (BDD) process, which focuses on what a user wants a system to do, and not on how it does it. The Behave documentation provides a good overview of the key concepts and their origins in BDD.↩