[tor-bugs] #9874 [BridgeDB]: Research/design a way to automate testing of BridgeDB's HTTPS and email distributors

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#9874: Research/design a way to automate testing of BridgeDB's HTTPS and email
distributors
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     Reporter:  isis     |      Owner:  isis
         Type:           |     Status:  needs_information
  enhancement            |  Milestone:
     Priority:  normal   |    Version:
    Component:           |   Keywords:  bridgedb-unittests, automation, ci,
  BridgeDB               |  bridgedb-gsoc-application
   Resolution:           |  Parent ID:
Actual Points:           |
       Points:           |
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Changes (by trygve):

 * status:  needs_revision => needs_information


Comment:

 Perhaps I've misunderstood, but Sauce Connect or xvfb both seem applicable
 to "above the browser" testing, whereas mechanize and derivatives (twill
 or zope.testbrowser) both function "below the browser", in the sense that
 they simulate a web browser but don't require one to be present. So
 mechanize works by opening URLs and interacting with the underlying HTML
 DOM received via HTTP/TCP, as opposed to simulating mouse events on the
 Browser in something like Selenium. The xvfb library stands for 'X Virtual
 Framebuffer', which doesn't sound like something which would be useful
 with mechanize.

 I think Python + mechanize would be something that would be possible to
 integrate into Travis-CI, but I don't have any experience with this. There
 are a number of existing twisted.trial test scripts (run using "bridgedb
 test"), which I'm assuming already integrate into Travis-CI? If this is
 the case, it should be easy enough to add the mechanize tests to this
 framework. There is one significant difference compared to the other unit
 tests: mechanize actually requires the bridgedb application to be running,
 and is therefore more of an "integration test" than a unit test. But I've
 used unit test frameworks in the past to create suites of integration
 tests, so this shouldn't be an obstacle.

 In light of the above, do you still feel your comment about Sauce Connect
 or xvfb is still applicable? If not, I'd like to work on incorporating
 this HTTPS test into the twisted.trial test suite. Also, I've got a Python
 script which can test the SMTP autoresponder working (it used Python to
 send a message to the bridgedb SMTP server, and then listens on a port for
 the response, checking that an email is received that contains the text
 "Here are your bridges").

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9874#comment:10>
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