Testing ain't hard, even for SysAdmins
summary
Claim: testing small sysadmin scripts is practical and stops touching production. Demonstrates a script that interacts with saltstack to discover minions, order monthly package updates and staged reboots, and shows tests that use mock.patch and magic mock to avoid a real master, run under nose and Python’s unit test. Tests catch prompting, call arguments and config-file paths; the script improves but still uncovers new production edge cases so it’s useful but not a one‑off guarantee.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:04What is Saltstack
- 7:51Package Modules
- 11:32Starting point
- 13:44Testing a script
- 15:34Testing inside a script
- 18:09Not throwing an exception
- 18:48Patch replaces functionality
- 20:30Configuration files
- 22:45General principle
- 23:25QA
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