Docker compose managed test harness

Example for a blog post about nginx docker compose

Prerequisites

• Github token with these repos in scope. GH_TOKEN
• docker
• docker compose
• git

Setup

Set your environment variables & initialize submodules

cp .env.sample .env
echo "GH_TOKEN=<SuperSecretGithubToken>" > .env
source .env

git submodule sync
git submodule update --init --recursive

./bin/build_local.sh

Build the Environments

To run this you will execute one of the following commands depending on your build source:

Local Build

To build from local directories, run:

./bin/build_local.sh

This setup allows for hot-swapping of code. Any changes made in the repo_refs directories will be immediately reflected in the running containers, allowing developers to see their changes in real-time via the nginx server.

GitHub Build

To build from GitHub repositories, run:

./bin/build_github.sh

The GitHub build process is isolated from the local development environment, ensuring a clean and isolated build environment. This prevents any potential conflicts with local volumes.

CircleCi Oddities

Checkout .circleci/config.yml to see how circleci is being run.

You'll notice that the build_github.sh script does not share volumes to inject the default.conf into nginx. This is because circleci does not allow volume sharing between the host and the docker executor. This is a limitation of the circleci platform, and not a limitation of docker. As such we copy the nginx file into the container after the build process and restart the nginx service.

CircleCI is also not a huge fan of docker compose port forwarding, so we run the tests from inside their docker container to be able to access the ngninx service on the network.

Once Built

Once the container is up and running, you can hit http://localhost:8089/ it / will route you to FE react project by default.

http://localhost:8089/backend/ will route you to the backend service.

http://localhost:8089/api/ will route you to the backend service with the api path.

Running the Test suite

In the directory test you'll find a cypress test suite. In here is our business logic testing. It is a marvel of modern cypriotic book approval/censorship. After you have bin/build_local.sh running, follow the instructions in ./test/README.md and boot up the Cypress tests.

What on earth are these services?

React1(localhost:8089/) - a frontend application allowing users to reccomend books for listing. React2(localhost:8089/backend) - Super secret admin panel app allowing admins to approve or deny books for listing Rails(localhost:8089/api/books) - Api holding the data, performing business logic. ¡Truly revolutionary!