ConTest Generator

contest-generator is a tool used to build the ConTest server with the plugins you want.

We provide a standard main.go, where we only include the most common plugins, but you can use contest-generator to customize your own, with your own set of plugins.

You need two steps:

• define your plugins in a configuration file
• run contest-generator with that configuration file

See core-plugins.yml for an example of a configuration file, or keep reading for a description of the configuration format.

Configuration format

The configuration file has one section per plugin type, and each section has a list of import paths. For example:

targetmanagers:
  - github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/targetmanagers/targetlist

In this example, targetmanagers is the plugin type, and it will be registered as a TargetManager object, and github.com/.../targetlist is the actual import path.

There are four plugin types:

• targetmanagers: at least one is needed
• testfetchers: at least one is needed
• teststeps: at least one is needed
• reporters: at least one is needed

Duplicate package names are not allowed, because they will result in ambiguous imports in the output code. If you have multiple import paths with the same package name, you can specify an optional import_alias field.

The following syntax will generate an error:

targetmanagers:
  - path: github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/targetmanagers/blah

teststeps:
  - path: github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/testfetchers/blah

because there is no way to distinguish which package blah refers to. So you can use:

targetmanagers:
  - path: github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/targetmanagers/blah
    alias: tm_blah

teststeps:
  - path: github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/teststeps/blah
    alias: ts_blah

$ go run .
2021/08/17 11:14:18 Generating output file '/tmp/contest846469752/contest.go' with the following plugins):
TargetManagers
    github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/targetmanagers/targetlist
    github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/targetmanagers/csvtargetmanager
TestFetchers
    github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/testfetchers/literal
    github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/testfetchers/uri
TestSteps
    github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/teststeps/cmd => ts_cmd
    github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/teststeps/sshcmd
    github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/teststeps/sleep
Reporters
    github.com/linuxboot/contest/plugins/reporters/targetsuccess
2021/08/17 11:14:18 Generated file '/tmp/contest846469752/contest.go'. You can build it by running 'go build' in the output directory.
/tmp/contest846469752

You can also specify an alternative file with the list of plugins:

$ ./contest-generator --from my-core-plugins.yml

See ./contest-generator -h for the full list of command line arguments.

Notice that it creates a file called contest.go in a temporary directory. To build it, go to the output directory (in the above example /tmp/contest822776154/), then run

go mod init contest # skip this if you are not using Go modules
go mod tidy         # skip this if you are not using Go modules
go build

and it will create an executable called contest, which is your custom ConTest server.