Building Build Tests

KIWI NG provides a collection of integration test images for different architectures and distributions. The test descriptions cover a number of appliance features that can be built with KIWI NG. The test descriptions are stored in a directory structure of the following layout: build-tests/ARCH/DISTRIBUTION/test-image-NAME. To build integration test image(s), the script build-tests.sh exists.

The implementation of build-tests.sh calls kiwi’s boxbuild command in container mode, which allows calling the script on any host system that allows you to run container instances via podman.

Warning

Architectures

Cross-architecture image building is possible and also supported via boxbuild, but the performance impact is big, even in containers using qemu-binfmt, and even bigger in full qemu arch emulation. This would slow down building the integration tests a lot, and therefore, build-tests.sh requires the host architecture to match the image target architecture.

Prior to calling build-tests.sh, the following requirements must be met:

Tools

Install the packages providing the following tools:

  • tree

  • git

  • xmllint

  • podman

  • pip

Source Checkout

Check out the kiwi git repo, which provides the test descriptions as well as the build-tests.sh script.

$ git clone https://github.com/OSInside/kiwi.git

kiwi-boxed-plugin

Fetch the kiwi-boxed-plugin from pip. It provides the boxbuild command used by build-tests.sh.

$ pip install --upgrade kiwi-boxed-plugin

Warning

Make sure to be able to execute kiwi-ng. In case there was no KIWI NG installed on your host, you will be notified by the kiwi-boxed-plugin installation to update your path to export PATH:~/.local/bin/kiwi-ng:$PATH. If in doubt about all this, just install kiwi from pip too. pip install --upgrade kiwi

Building a specific integration test can be done as follows:

$ cd kiwi
$ ./build-tests.sh \
      --test-dir build-tests/x86/tumbleweed/ \
      --test-name test-image-disk

Building all integration tests for a specific arch and distribution can be done as follows:

$ cd kiwi
$ ./build-tests.sh \
      --test-dir build-tests/x86/tumbleweed/

Note

Building all integration tests can take some time and depends on the number of tests provided as well as on the build power of the host system. In general, the tests can also run in parallel or be distributed to multiple hosts.