Scrutinizing OpenWISP Controller 0.8.0
I added GitHub Workflow for continuous testing on ansible-openwisp2 yesterday. The failing build suspected something is wrong in the latest release of the openwisp-controller.
The test suite for the master branch of openwisp-controller was failing locally with a random error. I suspected that maintainers will release the module with a failing test suite. It had to be something in my development environment.
OpenWISP’s account was still out of TravisCI credits. So I wrote another GitHub workflow for the openwisp-controller. This was dead easy. I just copied the whole YAML from openwisp-controller, made a few tweaks and it started working fine. And yes, the build was passing on GitHub Actions and my suspicion was right, my development environment was outdated.
After making sure that the test suite for openwisp-controller was passing for the master branch, I began to dig into the code. Quickly, I saw the problem. An openwisp-controller setting was directly used from the Django’s setting object instead of from the module’s settings. I thought changing that will fix everything. After making those changes, the build for openwisp-controller was passing but ansible-openwisp2 was failing.
This bug was more complex than I thought. After banging my head on the
codebase, I figured out that the cause of this problem was in settings.py.
A setting was set in the test project of openwisp-controller which was missing
in ansible-openwisp2. I removed that setting from the settings.py and mocked
it for the test cases which relied on it.
Again, the test suite was passing for openwisp-controller and failing for ansible-openwisp2. But, I have made progress at this point. The number of failing tests reduced.
The remaining test cases which were failing complained that a mocked function was never called. I was completely clueless about this error. I asked for help on the OpenWISP Gitter channel and called off the day hoping that someone could help me with this.
In other news
An OpenWISP user was having trouble upgrading the openwisp-controller to 0.8.0 with the current ansible-openwisp2 role. I felt bad that due to me, users are not able to use the latest release of OpenWISP which is packed with so many goodies. This made me more desperate to completely fix these issues and get it working.