schuellerf/xfce-test repository overview

⁠XFCE Test

XFCE Test is a setup of a Dockercontainer with Behave⁠ tests and an interactive bash helper xfce-test. The main usecases are:

• Creation of automatic Demo tours (MP4 videos) of XFCE applications
• Fully automatic GUI tests (which can be "documented" also by creation of a video)
• Great support for translators by searching and highlighting of translation artefacts and highlighting them within a scenario (this functionality is not yet usable)

The automatically created videos are on my youtube channel⁠ for now.

This containers are based on ubuntu with a build from git sources of all core Xfce components + some apps for testing. Other distributions and versions will be supported at a later stage!

⁠Flavors

There are some flavors available (see the dockerfiles/ directory) which mainly destinguish between the base container.

The special tags are described here:

⁠latest

Dockerfile-latest currently builds "MAIN_BRANCH=last_tag" which ends up with the current master but going back to the last valid tag set.

⁠last_release

Dockerfile-last_release currently builds "MAIN_BRANCH=last_release" which tries to find the last tag starting with "xfce-M.m" which should be a special tag representing some compatibility between the main components

⁠devel

Dockerfile-devel really builds "master" so the latest source available

⁠Travis

The tests are run automatically by travis⁠.

:white_check_mark: Those test are usually errored or failed as we are building master of the xfce repositories. A more stable branch will follow.

⁠Architecture

This test is set-up as a docker container which is displaying it's X11 content on a Xephyr instance on your screen.

The first process to be started is LDTP⁠ As "toolkit-accessibility" is activated (see Dockerfile) LDTP provides an XMLRPC port to run automated tests.

On top of LDTP there is Behave⁠ running a series of tests.

You can also just start the container and "play around" in the newest XFCE environment...

xfce-test start

⁠Preparations

either "read" the xfce-test script :) or at least assure docker and Xephyr to be on-board

For ubuntu those prerequisites are automatically installed by xfce-test

⁠Installation

There is no direct need to install XFCE Test but for convenience you can install the script and the bash autocompletion functions with ./xfce-test install

If you did not clone all the source code of xfce-test already you can boot-strap easily with:

curl --fail --location -o /tmp/xfce-test https://github.com/schuellerf/xfce-test/raw/master/xfce-test && chmod u+x /tmp/xfce-test && /tmp/xfce-test install

⁠Usage

Just start xfce-test to get an interactive menu for possible options or call xfce-test --help

To see the container in action and play around with the "master" versions of XFCE applications just run xfce-test pull to get the current container and xfce-test start to start the container.

⁠Tests

To inspect stuff inside the docker to help create more tests you might want to start sniff which will help you identify the windows and buttons for LDTP.

⁠Building

You don't need to build the container you can just pull one to work with. If you really want to build the container locally you can just call

xfce-test build

When you want to have the sources from some timeago you can use the "DOWNLOAD_DATE" to help there

DOWNLOAD_DATE=2020-07-01 xfce-test build

If you have enough RAM, let's say more than 10G, you can build all components in parallel like so:

TAG=ubuntu_20.04-xfce-4.16 LOG=build-${TAG}.log PARALLEL_BUILDS=8 ./xfce-test build

This drastically reduces the container build time.

⁠Normal Test

When you want to make screenshots for each behave test step just set the variable SCREENSHOTS to ALWAYS

export SCREENSHOTS=ALWAYS

then run your behave tests

⁠Translation Assistance

This is highly experimental!

If you are fine that some of your files on your computer might get deleted, you could run /behave_tests/translations.sh and see the resulting html file in /data/lang-screenshots

⁠Package compilation

You can also use this container as test and compilation environment. The directory you are currently in, is automatically mounted to /data in the container.

All the default build options which are used by the container are available as AUTOGEN_OPTIONS environment variable in the container. So when you started the container with xfce-test start or xfce-test no-session you can use those options for example by calling ./autogen.sh $AUTOGEN_OPTIONS in the application.

⁠Sources

As the applications of the container are built from source all developer packages and many developer tools are pre-installed. Also the sourcecode is available in the folder /git within the container

⁠Examples

An advanced example if you want to check a command in all docker images you have locally:

xfce-test list_local|xargs -n1 -I XYZ bash -c "TAG=XYZ xfce-test call apt search gtk-3-dev 2>&1 | egrep gtk-3\|working ; echo '----' "

This results in:

You are working with the container: latest
libgtk-3-dev/now 3.24.12-1ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,local]
----
You are working with the container: ubuntu_19.04
libgtk-3-dev/now 3.24.8-1ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,local]
----
You are working with the container: audio_test
libgtk-3-dev/now 3.24.8-1ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,local]
----
You are working with the container: ubuntu_18.04
libgtk-3-dev/now 3.22.30-1ubuntu4 amd64 [installed,local]
----