Hello. This post is about how to setup automated tests to check if your application's docker deployment is working or not. I used it extensively while working on the Docker deployment of the Open Event Server. In this tutorial, we will use Travis CI as the testing service.

To start testing your github project for Docker deployment, first add the repo to Travis. Then create a .travis.yml in the project's root directory.

In that file, add docker to services.

services:
  - docker

The above will enable docker in the testing environment. It will also include docker-compose by default.

Next step is to build your app and run it. Since this is a pre-testing step, we will add it in the install directive.

install:
  - docker build -t myapp .
  - docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:80:4000 --name myapp myapp

The 4000 in the above text is assuming your app runs on port 4000 inside the container. Also it is assumed that the Dockerfile is in the root of the repo.

So now that the docker app is running, it's time to test it.

script:
  - docker ps | grep -i myapp

The above will test if our app is in one of the running docker processes. It is a basic test to see if the app is running or not.

We can go ahead and test the app's functionality with some sample requests. Create a file test.py with the following contents.

import requests

r = requests.get('http://127.0.0.1/')
assert 'HomePage' in r.content, 'No homepage loaded'

Then run it as a test.

script:
  - docker ps | grep -i myapp
  - python test.py

You can make use of the unittest module in Python to bundle and create more organized tests. The limit is the sky here.

In the end, the .travis.yml will look something like the following

language: python
python:
  - "2.7"

install:
  - docker build -t myapp .
  - docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:80:4000 --name myapp myapp

script:
  - docker ps | grep -i myapp
  - python test.py

So this is it. A basic tutorial on testing Docker deployments using the awesome Travis CI service.

Feel free to share it and comment your views.