A simple RDBMS test environment with Docker

Introduction

When developing or maintaining the FDO code base, its unit test suite should be run and updated constantly to ensure any changes do not break existing behavior.

While the test suites are easy to run for the FDO core and for file-based FDO providers like SDF, SHP, SQLite, etc. It is a bit more difficult when testing the GenericRdbms-based providers as this requires an actual installation of the RDBMS in question to be able to run the specific provider unit tests against.

With the advent of ​Docker and containerization, it is very simple to set up an RDBMS test environment for one or more GenericRdbms FDO providers without the overhead of having to physically install the required RDBMSes "bare metal" on the host development machine or needing to stand up an actual server with the RDBMSes installed.

A docker-based environment is easy to setup and easy to tear down, which makes it ideal for spinning up a RDBMS test environment.

Requirements

To setup such an environment, you need an operating system that supports Docker. This can be:

• Windows 10 (with container support enabled)
• Any Linux distribution running kernel 3.10 or later

For a full list of platforms supported by docker, ​click here

It is recommended that you have 6GB or RAM available to be able to spin up all the RDBMSes together at once.

If you are on Windows 10, you must make sure the Docker daemon is on Linux containers mode.

If your host OS is none of the above (eg. You are on Windows 7/8/8.1), you can use a virtual machine that is running one of the above OSes.

An example docker compose file

With the docker-compose tool that comes with a docker installation, you can spin up all the required databases to hit your RDBMS provider test suites against.

Here's an example docker-compose.yml file that defines an environment with:

• MySQL 5.5
• PostgreSQL 9.6 with PostGIS 2.4
• SQL Server 2017

version: "3"
services:
  postgis:
    image: "kartoza/postgis:latest"
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: "postgres"
      POSTGRES_PASS: "changeme"
      POSTGRES_MULTIPLE_EXTENSIONS: "postgis"
      POSTGRES_DB: "template_postgis"
  mysql_55:
    image: "mysql:5.5"
    ports:
      - "3306:3306"
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: "fdotest"
  mssql:
    image: "microsoft/mssql-server-linux"
    ports:
      - "1433:1433"
    environment:
      SA_PASSWORD: "Sql2016!"
      ACCEPT_EULA: "Y"

In the directory where you have this file, you can then run the following command to spin up all 3 RDBMSes at once:

docker-compose up

On the first run, this will download the required docker images for all 3 RDBMSes and then spin them up as running containers.

Stopping the command (eg. By CTRL-C) will stop all the running containers.

On subsequent runs, the images are not downloaded (as they have been downloaded locally)

Some one-time PostgreSQL setup

UPDATE 14/1/2020: The remarks below are no longer applicable if you use the kartoza/postgis image. The above docker-compose.yml has been updated to use this image. If you use the updated docker-compose.yml referenced above, you can ignore the remarks below. If you are using a different image for PostgreSQL, please observe the remarks below

The PostgreSQL provider test suite assumes that public is the only schema of any PostGIS database it creates. The chosen docker image, while fully featured, breaks this assumption as it includes extra schemas like tiger (for tiger geocoding) and topology, which the provider does not use, nor does the test suite exercise.

So before running the PostgreSQL test suite, use a tool like pgAdmin to connect to the PostGIS docker container and make sure to drop any schema that is not public from the template_postgis and postgres databases.

This action only needs to be done once.

Alternatively, you could try a different PostGIS docker image (or roll your own) that does not include these extraneous schemas in their PostGIS database setup.

Running the GenericRdbms test suites against it

Firstly, build FDO, its providers and its unit tests as usual.

Then make a copy of the following files under <FDO_DIR>/Providers/GenericRdbms/Src/UnitTest:

• SqlServerSpatialInit.txt
• MySqlInit.txt
• PostGisInit.txt
• OdbcInit.txt

Windows only: Where required, make sure libmysql.dll and libpq.dll are present in the directories where UnitTestMySQL.exe and UnitTestPostGIS.exe are present.

Edit these copies so that the service points to the hostname or IP address of the docker host (if the docker host sits inside the virtual machine, then you want to point your configs to the hostname/IP of the virtual machine). Change any credentials if required to match what is defined in your docker-compose.yml file.

Then it's a case of leveraging the initfiletest parameter that all GenericRdbms-based unit test executables support to run the test suite against this modified configuration

Here is a simple window batch script that can run the battery of applicable GenericRdbms test suites against this spun up docker environment, assuming:

• You built FDO for Debug|x64
• Your FDO source tree is in D:\fdo-trunk
• Your modified init text files reside in D:\fdo_test
• You want to capture test output for all tests to files in D:\fdo_results

  cd /D D:\fdo-trunk\Providers\GenericRdbms\Src\UnitTest
  Dbg64\UnitTestSQLServerSpatial.exe -NoWAIT initfiletest=D:\fdo_test\SqlServerSpatialInit.txt 2>&1 | tee D:\fdo_results\Dbg64_UnitTestSQLServerSpatial.txt
  cd /D D:\fdo-trunk\Providers\GenericRdbms\Src\UnitTest
  Dbg64\UnitTestMySQL.exe -NoWAIT initfiletest=D:\fdo_test\SqlServerSpatialInit.txt 2>&1 | tee D:\fdo_results\Dbg64_UnitTestSQLServerSpatial.txt
  cd /D D:\fdo-trunk\Providers\GenericRdbms\Src\UnitTest
  Dbg64\UnitTestPostGIS.exe -NoWAIT initfiletest=D:\fdo_test\SqlServerSpatialInit.txt 2>&1 | tee D:\fdo_results\Dbg64_UnitTestSQLServerSpatial.txt
  cd /D D:\fdo-trunk\Providers\GenericRdbms\Src\UnitTest
  Dbg64\UnitTestODBC.exe OdbcSqlServerTests -NoWAIT initfiletest=D:\fdo_test\OdbcInit.txt 2>&1 | tee D:\fdo_results\Dbg64_UnitTestODBC_SqlServer.txt
  cd /D D:\fdo-trunk\Providers\GenericRdbms\Src\UnitTest
  Dbg64\UnitTestODBC.exe OdbcMySqlTests -NoWAIT initfiletest=D:\fdo_test\OdbcInit.txt 2>&1 | tee D:\fdo_results\Dbg64_UnitTestODBC_MySQL.txt
  

If you want to test against different versions of one or more RDBMSes, assuming a ​docker image is available for your version of interest, you can edit your docker-compose.yml to replace or add on the extra docker image (NOTE: Adding extra docker images will impose an additional burden on your system resources).