Testing Stacks

After you create or update a stack, the next consideration is to test the stack to check that it meets your needs. To validate a stack in your local Appsody development environment, use the stack validation command. Stack validation performs several operations against the stack and provides a summary of these operations.

Validation process

Stack validation consists of six operations:

Lint: Statically analyzes your source code to verify that it conforms to the structure of an Appsody stack.
Package: Builds the stack images and templates and generates an Appsody repository index that you can use for local testing.
Init: Initializes an Appsody project that uses the default project template from your stack.
Run: Starts the Appsody development container that was created during initialization.
Test: Runs the project's test suite in the Appsody development container. The test suite is composed of generic tests in the stack.
Build: Generates a production Docker image ready for deployment to your runtime platform of choice.

Testing a stack using the Appsody CLI

Navigate to the root directory of your stack
Run the following command:

appsody stack validate

If your stack is already packaged and you don't want to run the package operation as part of validate, you can use the --no-package flag.

After completion, it provides a summary of the results. The following summary output shows the result of running validate against the starter stack:

@@@@@@@@@ Validate Summary Start @@@@@@@@@@ PASSED: Lint for stack: starter PASSED: Package for stack: starter PASSED: Init for stack: starter PASSED: Run for stack: starter PASSED: Test for stack: starter PASSED: Build for stack: starter Total PASSED: 6 Total FAILED: 0 @@@@@@@@@ Validate Summary End @@@@@@@@@@

The summary provides a result for each of the operations and a total for the overall number of passed and failed operations.

Next steps

You have now developed, packaged, and tested a stack. You can now publish your stack so that other developers can use its functionality to accelerate development of their own cloud-native applications. For more information, see Publishing Stacks.