Running GitLab QA

The following documentation is meant to provide instructions for running GitLab QA against a deployed cloud native GitLab installation. These steps are performed as a part of the CI for this project but manual runs may be requested during development or a demo.

Preparation

Before running GitLab QA, there are a few things to do.

Determine running version of GitLab

From your deployed GitLab chart, visit /admin and see the Components panel for the version of GitLab that is running. If this is X.Y.Z-pre, then you will want the nightly image. If this is X.Y.Z-ee, then you will want this version of GitLab QA image.

Export GITLAB_VERSION based on what you have observed: 

export GITLAB_VERSION=11.0.3-ee

or: 

export GITLAB_VERSION=nightly

Install the gitlab-qa gem

Ensure you have a functional version of Ruby, preferably of the 2.5 branch. Install the gitlab-qa gem: 

gem install gitlab-qa

For more info, see the GitLab QA documentation.

Docker

GitLab QA makes use of Docker, so you will need to have an operational installation. Ensure that the daemon is running. If you have set GITLAB_VERSION=nightly, pull the GitLab QA nightly image to ensure that the latest nightly is used for testing, in conjunction with the nightly builds of the CNG containers: 

docker pull gitlab/gitlab-ee-qa:$GITLAB_VERSION

Network access

To run GitLab QA, you will need sustained network access to the deployed instance. Ensure this by visiting the deployment from any browser, or via cURL.

Configuration

Items needed for execution, which will be set as environment variables:

  • GITLAB_VERSION: The version of GitLab QA version to run. See determine running version of GitLab above.
  • GITLAB_USERNAME: This will be root.
  • GITLAB_PASSWORD: This will be the password for the root user.
  • GITLAB_ADMIN_USERNAME: This will be root.
  • GITLAB_ADMIN_PASSWORD: This will be the password for the root user.
  • GITLAB_URL: The fully-qualified URL to the deployed instance. This should be in the form of https://gitlab.domain.tld.
  • EE_LICENSE: A string containing a GitLab EE license. This can be handled via export EE_LICENSE=$(cat GitLab.gitlab-license).
  • GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN: A string containing a valid GitHub Personal Access Token. This will be used to test the GitHub importer. For GitLab team members, you can find the access token for the GitLab QA user in 1password.

Retrieve the above items, and export them as environment variables.

Execution

Assuming you have set the environment variables from the Configuration step, the following command will perform the tests against the deployed GitLab instance: 

gitlab-qa Test::Instance::Any EE:$GITLAB_VERSION $GITLAB_URL
note
The above command runs with nightly because the containers used as a part of this chart are currently based on nightly builds of the master branches of gitlab-(ee|ce) repositories.