tentacle

Tentacle

Tentacle provides a way to orchestrate interactions between seperate Node processes and check their states at predefined points.

Designed for use with a microservice framework like Seneca or Hapi.

Requirements

• Node v0.11.x and up OR traceur
• Understanding of ES6 Generators
• If using a testing framework, one that supports generators, e.g. co-mocha

Syntax

Tentacle uses the EcmaScript 6 Generators syntax to reduce the amount of boilerplate around the async operations neccessary for communicating between processes. This helps keep our tests nice and clean.

Therefore tentacle must be run with Node v0.11.x and upward, or with Node v0.10.x and upward using traceur.

(see Setup)

API

tentacle

var tentacle = require('tentacle');

The main tentacle module is required within the testing file, and is used to fork sub processes.

var child = tentacle('path/to/microservice');

tentacle#next

The call to next returns a sort of event iterator, that iterates chronologically over each sucker call in a child process.

test('microservice first state should be successful', function * () {
  var child = tentacle('path/to/microservice');
  var process = yield child.next();

  assert('success', process.state);	
})

Notice we use the yield keyword with child.next(), and the test callback function is actually a generator (observe the asterisk * after function). This essentially freezes the the test until the asynchronous operations (child.next) is complete.

sucker

var sucker = require('tentacle/sucker');

Or:

var sucker = require('tentacle').sucker;

The sucker module is required into the processes being tested, it communicates state back to the main test files.

sucker is a function, we can use it to pass any object to a tentacle

sucker({pass:'any object'})

The convention used by fail and pass is to supply an object with state and arguments properties, so we may want to follow that convention for objects we pass through sucker. For instance:

sucker({state: 'finished'})

sucker#fail

Call fail to communicate a failing state

Example using seneca:

seneca.act({cmd:'doSomething'}, function (err, args) {
  if (err) { sucker.fail(); return; }
});

Theres no need to pass the error through to fail, the arguments of the callback function are picked up by the tentacle sucker and communicated to the calling process via the state object returned from tentacle, under the arguments property.

sucker#pass

Call pass to communicate a passing state

Example using seneca:

seneca.act({cmd:'doSomething'}, function (err, args) {
  if (err) { sucker.fail(); return; }
  //seems like there's no error so lets pass
  sucker.pass();
});

Setup

Node v0.11.x

If using Node v0.11.x or above, ensure that node is run with the --harmony flag (or at the least, the --harmony-generators flag).

node --harmony mytests.js

If you're using a test framework, you'll have to ensure that it supports a way to pass the harmony flag onto the node executable. For instance with co-mocha it would be

mocha --harmony mytest.js

Node v0.10.x

We are able to run tests on Node v0.10.x (and possibly lower), with traceur, to do so we must create a bootstrap file, For example:

//mytest-boostrap.js

var traceur = require('traceur');
traceur.require.makeDefault(function(filename) {
  // don't transpile our dependencies, just our app
  return filename.indexOf('node_modules') === -1;
});
require('./mytest.js');

Then we would run our test with

node mytest-bootstrap.js

It may be that our chosen framework has a way to include traceur transparently, without the need for a bootstrap file, for instance there's the mocha-traceur module which allows us to run our tests using

mocha --compilers js:mocha-traceur mytest.js

Todo

• tests