How to get a proper local setup and test suite runnin for manageiq and manageiq-ui-classic?

[dennym]

I'm doing ruby development for 15 years and haven't seen convoluted setup of ruby and gems in any project.
I manage usually my ruby and gems with rvm.

Initially my plan was to debug an issue on manage-ui-classic but multiple problems popped up which seem to relate to all the custom tooling that miq has.

First thing I tried was getting the testsuite running and be green on master branch of manageiq

rvm use 3.0.5
rvm gemset use miq-dev
bin/update
rspec

This gets plenty of the specs green and some of them red plus I get plenty of deprication warnings. So apparently I still miss a not documented and not ruby/rails standard approached way of running it as miq intended it.
I also followed https://www.manageiq.org/docs/guides/developer_setup/running_test_suites and tried it with bundle exec rake which results in the same issues. Additionally the spec deletes a .gitkeep file which then requires to git checkout -- . So if someone could enlighten me on that I would be grateful.

Second I went ahead of getting the test suite of manage-ui-classic running and followed the description of symlinking and some obfuscated override and bin/updateing miq repo first and then the classic-ui repo which succeeds (yay finally some success :))
Not sure why going this way and not just do in the miq repo gemfile something like gem "manage-ui-classic", path: "../manage-classic-ui" and then work with rspec tags and then have focus: true on either specific specs or blocks that are supposed to run? With filtering there can be even more finegrained examples be run.

Third How do I run a specific controller spec in miq-ui-classic? rake app:spec:controller is still quite alot when I want to run a specific spec. With rspec it would be usually either focus: true or rspec spec/controllers/foo_controller_spec.rb.

Appendix: Sorry about starting that post a bit harsh. I don't mean it as an insult... just feels quite frustrating which also limits adoptability of FOSS development ❤️

best

[Fryguy]

Hi @dennym Welcome!

https://www.manageiq.org/docs/guides/developer_setup.html is the starting point for getting set up. You'll also want to follow https://www.manageiq.org/docs/guides/developer_setup/plugins since you're interested in UI development, which is a plugin (unlike "normal" Rails apps). Admittedly, there might be things that go wrong in the guides over time, so if you run across any issues feel free to open issues or PRs in https://github.com/ManageIQ/guides.

rspec

To run the specs you can run bundle exec rake test:vmdb or just bundle exec rake (which defaults to the test:vmdb suite). If you ran bin/setup or bin/update the test database should have been created for you, but if not you can run bundle exec rake test:vmdb:setup

I am surprised a full rpsec didn't work for you. A long time ago, we had a number of specs that couldn't run as part of the full rspec command, so we broke it up into test suites, but nowadays I'd expect rspec to work. Can you give more details on what you saw, perhaps in an issue?

Additionally the spec deletes a .gitkeep file which then requires to git checkout -- . So if someone could enlighten me on that I would be grateful.

Can you open an issue or PR for this? That should not be happening.

Second I went ahead of getting the test suite of manage-ui-classic running and followed the description of symlinking and some obfuscated override and bin/updateing miq repo first and then the classic-ui repo which succeeds (yay finally some success :))
Not sure why going this way and not just do in the miq repo gemfile something like gem "manage-ui-classic", path: "../manage-classic-ui"

You can modify the core Gemfile that way and it will work. We introduced bundler-inject to avoid local diffs where the Gemfile was modified and accidentally committed by the PR author (didn't happen so much for repo references, but has happened on occasion with development gems people needed).

Note that if all you're doing is changing manageiq-ui-classic and running tests from within ui-classic, you don't need to modify the core Gemfile or do the override_gem thing. You only need to do that if you're modifying things in core as well and want both repos to recognize each other. This is not uncommon for devs to create cross-repo PRs.

Third How do I run a specific controller spec in miq-ui-classic? rake app:spec:controller is still quite alot when I want to run a specific spec. With rspec it would be usually either focus: true or rspec spec/controllers/foo_controller_spec.rb.

bundle exec rspec /path/to/the_spec.rb should work for any individual spec file. focus:true or any other rspec tagging should also just work.

Appendix: Sorry about starting that post a bit harsh. I don't mean it as an insult... just feels quite frustrating which also limits adoptability of FOSS development ❤️

I appreciate the clarification. We look forward to your contributions here! ❤️

---

This project is pretty old (it was actually started in 2006 and open sourced in 2012), so there's a lot of legacy here, which is probably why you're seeing some of the clunkiness compared to a "normal" Rails app. Most of us have been doing it this way for so long, we could use a fresh perspective on how to make it easier for the community. If you have suggestions on improvements, we'd love to hear them. Thanks!

[dennym]

Hey @Fryguy thanks for all the amazing input. I finally got stuff forth and back configured to have it running like I guess it is supposed to and I can hopefully can give some input.

since you're interested in UI development, which is a plugin

Well I feel like shouldn't be a plugin or gem since the controllers are critical monolithic part of MIQ. But this also might be due to historic growth of everything. Additionally I am not overly fond of ui things since I'm coming more from a backend/architectural side but in my current use case there is for me/us a critical bug/issue (ManageIQ/manageiq-ui-classic#8675) which I have to tackle first before I get into providers which is my main focus.

I finally also got rspec running. I think most of the issue came from the older version that are used for tools/runtimes/software since they require also older system libraries that are not available on ubuntu2204 (e.g. openssl1/openssl3 issues).

The deleted .gitkeep I might inspect when I got some sparetime since its an easy reset. Just made me cautious of what else the specs are deleting and modifying.

When working on a plugin repo I guess the symlinking is still required since the Gemfile which is loaded comes from miq main repository through the symlink? I already concluded yes as an answer for myself but confirmation is always nice.

Thanks again and lets see what I can do for miq :D