Automatic integration tests as part of the development life cycle can save a lot of time and money. Not only when dealing with other service APIs or offering some, also if the application uses a database or other infrastructure services.

We at Consol made a lot of good experience to develop the integration tests as part of the life cycle from the beginning of a project. Therefor the Citrus framework is often a good choice to do it automated.

But there are other frameworks and libraries which can be useful. In this article, we’ll have a look at Testcontainers. By using a sample microservice, we will show how Testcontainers can be used and what chances it provides.

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Sakuli v1.2.0 released!

_nowhere_ It’s about time for a new Sakuli release! Our latest release v1.2.0 is the first version to include a beta of Sakuli-UI, a web UI to help you develop and manage your tests.

The new release also brings a bunch of enhancements and bug-fixes, a detailed changelog is included in this post.

Once again, we want to say THANK YOU for the great support of our contributors, our valued supporting companies and of course ConSol!

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Docker Headless VNC Container 1.3.0 has been released today. The different Docker images contains a complete VNC based, headless UI environment for testautomation like Sakuli does or simply for web browsing and temporary work in a throw-away UI container. The functionality is pretty near to a VM based image, but can be started in seconds instead of minutes. Each Docker image has therefore installed the following components:

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Author:Tobias Schneck
Tags:docker, openshift, kubernetes, continuous integration, testautomation
Categories:development
Sakuli v1.1.0 released!

_nowhere_ Just in time before X-Mas holidays starts, we crate a huge release of our open source end-to-end testing framework Sakuli. The v1.1.0 release brings a bunch of new features and a brand new documentation with. The list of the current changes you will find bellow. Also we created a Short Overview Presentation so that you be able to get quick intro about what purpose of Sakuli is.

Also we wan’t to say a big THANK YOU for the great support of our contributors, our valued supporting companies and at least ConSol for making this possible as open source software. Double Thumbs up!!!

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The Tutorial “Docker based E2E application monitoring with Xfce UI and OMD Labs” describes how to:

  • Implement a complete containerized end-to-end monitoring environment
  • Testing HTML content
  • Testing native UI content
  • Setting up a monitoring with OMD Labs:
    • Grafana graphs about the performance times (end user perspective)
    • Alerts on errors with screenshots
  • Continuous execution of the test suite in a loop

Sources: see github.com/ConSol/sakuli-examples

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Author:Tobias Schneck
Tags:sakuli, docker, omd, end2end, testautomation, javascript, grafana
Categories:development, monitoring

Docker Headless VNC Container 1.2.0 has been released today. The different Docker images contains a complete VNC based, headless UI environment for testautomation like Sakuli does or simply for web browsing and temporary work in a throw-away UI container. The functionality is pretty near to a VM based image, but can be started in seconds instead of minutes. Each Docker image has therefore installed the following components:

more...

Author:Tobias Schneck
Tags:docker, openshift, continuous integration, testautomation
Categories:development

It has been a while since the last release in the Citrus universe. It took us some time to get the new Citrus release 2.7.2 ready for you.
Of course we were not being lazy in that time. Besides the new Citrus 2.7.2 release we are proud to announce a new player in the Citrus team. The Citrus administration UI is a
web-based user interface that helps you to manage your Citrus projects and test cases.

Often users complained about the complexity of having to learn all about Citrus and the Spring framework in particular as Citrus uses Spring for configuration and dependency injection.
Especially non-developers had problems to master the learning curve for Citrus and Spring when starting to use the framework. Also people asked for a way to have a user interface for managing
components and tests.

We heard you and introduced a new administration user interface for Citrus! There is a detailed Citrus Admin documentation (which is still ongoing).
However I would like to outline the main features of that web UI here in a short post for you.

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Author:Christoph Deppisch
Tags:docker, maven, citrus
Categories:citrus, development

Sowohl End-2-End-Testing als auch End-2-End-Monitoring folgen dem gleichen Paradigma – sie betrachten eine Applikation aus der Sicht des End-Users. Hier darf es keine Rolle spielen, in welcher Oberflächentechnologie die Applikation geschrieben ist oder in welcher Art sie mit dem End-User in Verbindung tritt. Genau an diesem Punkt setzt das Open-Source-Tool Sakuli an.

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The ELK-Stack is a good option to aggregate and visualize distributed logging-data. It basically based on

The core of the most ELK applications is the Logstash configuration. A user defines here which data (inputs) is processed, how (filter) the data is processed and where it will go afterwards (outputs). Especilly this configuration contains a lot of logic which is unfortunally not easy to test. In this article I want to show you how to setup a testing environment for your Logstash configuration.

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Author:Tim Keiner
Tags:ELK, Logstash, elasticsearch, docker, maven, citrus
Categories:citrus, development
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Getting started with Kubernetes can be intimidating at first. Installing Kubernetes is not the easiest of tasks and can get quite frustrating.[^1] Luckily, there is an out-of-the box distribution called Minikube which makes toying around with Kubernetes a bliss.

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Author:Christian Guggenmos
Tags:kubernetes, minikube, docker
Categories:development, java, kubernetes


For FOSDEM 2017, there are two DevRooms where ConSol employees are among the organizers.

Accordingly, the two devrooms have combined CfPs, so that you can submit your container cloud talk in just one place. These devrooms are interested in talks about:

_nowhere_
  • Monitoring containerized services
  • Automating cloud deployments
  • Developing and administering microservices
  • Container orchestration
  • Continuous Integration & Deployment
  • Prometheus, Kubernetes, Docker, CRIO, etc.
  • New projects and technology
  • Other container and cloud native talks

Submit Talk Proposals by November 26th on our CfP Page:

https://goo.gl/forms/bbfCH14ido5kMD4H3

Author:Gerhard Laußer
Tags:Container, Prometheus, Docker, Fosdem
Categories:monitoring

Stabile und skalierbare Testumgebungen für End-2-End-Tests sind seit jeher schwer aufzusetzen und zu warten. Besonders in Kombination mit automatisierten UI-Tests stellen sie Tester und Entwickler immer wieder vor große Herausforderungen. Einen eleganten Ausweg bieten in Container verpackte Testumgebungen, die sowohl Web- als auch Rich-Clients in echten Desktop-Umgebungen testen können. Als “Immutable Infrastruktur” betrieben, wird es dadurch möglich, einen definierten Systemstand jederzeit reproduzierbar aufzurufen und Tests darin performant auszuführen.

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Author:Tobias Schneck
Tags:Sakuli, end2end, e2e, testing, docker
Categories:sakuli, development

The [Sakuli Java DSL] setup shows how easily you can use [Sakuli] to test your application in an end-2-end scenario. This is a great starting point to learn how to use [Sakuli] together with [Maven] and [Docker].

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Author:Tobias Schneck
Tags:Sakuli, end2end, e2e, testing, docker
Categories:sakuli, development
assets/images/jsd2016.png

Der JUG Saxony Day fand am 30.09.2016 im Konferenzzentrum Radisson Blu Park Hotel in Dresden statt. Die von Anfang an gute und entspannte Atmosphäre beeindruckte ebenso wie die Auswahl der Vorträge. Insgesamt waren es über 30 Vorträge in 5 parallelen Tracks, die sowohl die aktuellen Trends in der Container-Technologie behandelten, Überblick über die neuesten Testing-Konzepte zeigten als auch einen Ausblick auf das zukünftige JDK 9 in petto hatten.

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Author:Tobias Schneck
Tags:Sakuli, end2end, e2e, testing, docker
Categories:sakuli, development

Travis CI is a free platform for continues integration tests which fits perfectly in our opensource products workflow with Github. Unfortunately it only supports uploading artifacts to amazon aws. Usually not a major problem, because most tests result in simple text output.
Latest Thruk Tests however are based on Sakuli and Docker and produce screenshots on errors because we do full enduser gui tests of the dashboard and other javascript based parts. So we need a way to store these screenshots on Dropbox.

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Author:Sven Nierlein
Tags:Travis, Docker, Dropbox, Sakuli, Thruk, Testautomation
Categories:travis, dropbox