I find myself currently writing a lot of orchastration code that manages hardware. This is very difficult because I like doing little test.rb scripts or testing things out in irb or pry to see if APIs are comfortable to use.
The problem with hardware is in order to properly populate my objects I need to query things like the iDRACs or gather inventories from all my switches to figure out where a piece of hardware is and this take a lot of time and requires constant access to my entire lab.
Of course my code has unit tests and so all the objects that represents servers and switches etc are already designed to be somewhat comfortable to load stub data for and to be easy to mock. So I ended up using rspec as my test.rb environment of choice.
I figured there has to be a way to use mocha in a non rspec environment, and turns out there is and it’s quite easy.
The magic here is line 1 and line 5, including Mocha::API will extend Object and Class with all the stubbing and mocking methods. I’d avoid using expectations and instead use stubs in this scenario.
At this point I’d be dropped into a pry shell loaded up with the service fixture in my working directory where I can quickly interact with my faked up hardware environment. I have many such hardware captures for each combination of hardware I support – and the same data is used in my unit tests too.
Below I iterate all the servers and find their mac addresses of the primary interfaces in each partition and then find all the switches they are connected to. Behind the scenes in real life this would walk all my switches looking for the port each mac is connected to and so forth, quite a time consuming operation and would require me to dedicate this lab hardware to me. Now I can just snapshot the hardware and load up my models later and it’s really quick.
I found this incredibly handy and will be using it pretty much all the time now, so thought it worth sharing ๐
