Getting Started

The first step towards using Avocado-VT is, quite obviously, installing it.

Installing Avocado-VT

Avocado-VT is an Avocado plugin, therefore you are going to need both in order to be able to execute the tests.

Both are primarily written in Python, so a standard Python installation is possible and often preferable.

If you just want to use the plugin to run tests you might prefer to use packages from your system’s package manager if available; this way non-python dependencies, esp. Avocado, are also taken care of automatically.

You can find more details about the Avocado installation here.

Installing via PIP

Pip is useful when it comes to python dependencies, but it fails in non-python ones. List of non-python requirements based on Fedora package names is:

$ dnf install xz tcpdump iproute iputils gcc glibc-headers nc git python-netaddr python-devel

Then you can get Avocado-VT via pip:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/avocado-framework/avocado-vt

Or by manually cloning it from github:

$ git clone https://github.com/avocado-framework/avocado-vt
$ cd avocado-vt
$ pip install .

It’s recommended to use pip even for local install as it treats requirements differently and the use of python setup.py install might fail.

Installing via system package manager

Installing Avocado-VT on Fedora or Enterprise Linux is a matter of installing the avocado-plugins-vt package. Install it with:

$ yum install avocado-plugins-vt

Which takes care of all the dependencies (python and non-python ones).

Setup Avocado-VT with sources

If you intend use avocado from sources, clone it into the same parent directory as Avocado sources and use make link from the Avocado sources directory. Details about this can be found here.

Bootstrapping Avocado-VT

After the package, a bootstrap process must be run. Choose your test backend (qemu, libvirt, v2v, openvswitch, etc) and run the vt-bootstrap command. Example:

$ avocado vt-bootstrap --vt-type qemu

Note

If you don’t intend to use JeOS and don’t want to install the xz you can use avocado vt-bootstrap --vt-type qemu --vt-guest-os $OS_OF_YOUR_CHOICE which bypasses the xz check.

The output should be similar to:

12:02:10 INFO | qemu test config helper
12:02:10 INFO |
12:02:10 INFO | 1 - Updating all test providers
12:02:10 INFO |
12:02:10 INFO | 2 - Checking the mandatory programs and headers
12:02:10 INFO | /bin/xz OK
12:02:10 INFO | /sbin/tcpdump OK
...
12:02:11 INFO | /usr/include/asm/unistd.h OK
12:02:11 INFO |
12:02:11 INFO | 3 - Checking the recommended programs
12:02:11 INFO | /bin/qemu-kvm OK
12:02:11 INFO | /bin/qemu-img OK
12:02:11 INFO | /bin/qemu-io OK
...
12:02:33 INFO | 7 - Checking for modules kvm, kvm-intel
12:02:33 DEBUG| Module kvm loaded
12:02:33 DEBUG| Module kvm-intel loaded
12:02:33 INFO |
12:02:33 INFO | 8 - If you wish, you may take a look at the online docs for more info
12:02:33 INFO |
12:02:33 INFO | http://avocado-vt.readthedocs.org/

If there are missing requirements, please install them and re-run vt-bootstrap.

Note

Recommended programs might be needed for Avocado to correctly recognize test cases for your test backend or for test cases to run correctly.

First steps with Avocado-VT

Let’s check if things went well by listing the Avocado plugins:

$ avocado plugins

That command should show the loaded plugins, and hopefully no errors. The relevant lines will be:

Plugins that add new commands (avocado.plugins.cli.cmd):
vt-bootstrap Avocado VT - implements the 'vt-bootstrap' subcommand
...
Plugins that add new options to commands (avocado.plugins.cli):
vt      Avocado VT/virt-test support to 'run' command
vt-list Avocado-VT/virt-test support for 'list' command

Then let’s list the tests available with:

$ avocado list --vt-type qemu --verbose

This should list a large amount of tests (over 1900 virt related tests):

ACCESS_DENIED: 0
BROKEN_SYMLINK: 0
BUGGY: 0
INSTRUMENTED: 49
MISSING: 0
NOT_A_TEST: 27
SIMPLE: 3
VT: 1906

Note

If no test cases are listed make sure you installed recommended programs on your system, s. “Bootstrapping Avocado-VT”.

Now let’s run a virt test:

$ avocado run type_specific.io-github-autotest-qemu.migrate.default.tcp
JOB ID     : <id>
JOB LOG    : /home/<user>/avocado/job-results/job-2015-06-15T19.46-1c3da89/job.log
JOB HTML   : /home/<user>/avocado/job-results/job-2015-06-15T19.46-1c3da89/html/results.html
TESTS      : 1
(1/1) type_specific.io-github-autotest-qemu.migrate.default.tcp: PASS (95.76 s)
PASS       : 1
ERROR      : 0
FAIL       : 0
SKIP       : 0
WARN       : 0
INTERRUPT  : 0
TIME       : 95.76 s

If you have trouble executing the steps provided in this guide, you have a few options: