Testing

The CentOS Project has some resources available for each SIG to run some CI jobs/tests for their projects. We'll document soon how to get onboarded (on request) on the CentOS CI infra platform.

We offer the following resources :

Openshift hosted jenkins (one per project/SIG), using usual authentication from FAS/ACO
bare-metal and/or Virtual Machines ephemeral nodes on which you can run some tests (including destructive ones), that will be automatically be reinstalled (for bare-metal) or discarded (for VMs) - aka Duffy

Openshift

Duffy (ephemeral bare-metal/Virtual Machines provider)

Duffy is the middle layer running ci.centos.org that manages the provisioning, maintenance and teardown / rebuild of the Nodes (physical hardware and VMs) that are used to run the tests in the CI Cluster.

We provide both bare-metal and VMs and support the following architectures :

x86_64 (both physical and VMs)
aarch64 (both physical and VMs)
ppc64le (only VMs on Power 8 or Power 9 but supporting nested virtualization)

To be able to request ephemeral nodes to run your tests, you'll need both your project name and api key that will be generated for you once your project will have be allowed on that Infra.

Note

It's worth knowing that there are quotas in place to ensure that you can't request infinite number of nodes in parallel and each session has a maximum lifetime of 6h. After that your nodes are automatically reclaimed by Duffy and are freshly reinstalled and put back in the Ready pool.

Warning

The following notes are only applicable for new Duffy v3 API that will be available around August 2023. Previous cico client will continue to work on actual Duffy v2 instance for the time being

Installing and configuring duffy client

Use pip (or pip3.8 on el8) to install duffy client.

pip install --user duffy[client]

Duffy client needs the tenant's name and the tenant's API key to be able to request sessions from duffy server. If the tenant doesn't exist yet, it should be created in duffy server. Having the tenant's name and the tenant's API key, create the file .config/duffy with the following content.

client:
  url: https://duffy.ci.centos.org/api/v1
  auth:
    name: <tenant name>
    key: <API key>

Requesting a session

Before creating a session, the name of the pool is required. Check the pool available executing the command.

duffy client list-pools

Note

The name of the pool is structured like this:

<AAA>-<BBB>-<CCC>-<DDD>-<EEE>-<FFF>

AAA: Identify if it is a bare metal or virtual machine
BBB: The kind of the instance, like seamicro, AWS EC2, etc
CCC: The size of the machine
DDD: The operational system
EEE: Operational system's version
FFF: The architecture

Having the name of the pool, request how many sessions needed. Duffy has a limit of sessions per tenant, this information is available in the duffy server.

duffy client request-session pool=<name of the pool>,quantity=<number of sessions>

By default this command outputs a json, but it's possible to change the format to yaml or flat using --format. Under "node" key it's possible to find the node's hostname provisioned. Log in to it as root user, using ssh.

{
<...output ommited...>

"nodes": [
    {
        "hostname": "<hostname>",
        "ipaddr": "<ip address>",

<...output ommited...>
}

Retiring a session

At the end of the test, you should "return" your ephemeral nodes to Duffy API service. This will trigger either a reinstall of the physical node (through kickstart) or just discarding/terminating it (if that's a cloud instance)

To retire a session, the session id is required. Check the id executing.

duffy client list-sessions

When needed to retire the session execute the command.

duffy client retire-session <session id>

zlopez / centos / sig-guide

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