I am having a hell of a time trying to start a server, wait until it is up, then run tests against it in a Gitlab CI pipeline. We have a makefile; calling this target with make e2e works perfectly from the command line locally on my Mac:
.PHONY: e2e
e2e: ## Run the default e2e target (localhost) and start & stop the e2e server
@echo "Starting the e2e server on port $(E2E_LOCAL_PORT)"
E2E_LOCAL_PORT=$(E2E_LOCAL_PORT) go run integration/e2e/server/server.go & \
echo $$! > server.pid
until nc -v -z localhost $(E2E_LOCAL_PORT); do echo "waiting for server..."; sleep 1; done
@echo "e2e server is responding PID=$$(cat server.pid)"
@echo "Running e2e tests against ${E2E_BASE_URL}"
E2E_BASE_URL=$(E2E_BASE_URL) go test -v ./integration/e2e/...
@-pkill -P $$(cat server.pid)
@rm server.pid
But when I call this from .gitlab-ci.yml as follows…
integration-tests:
# ...
script:
- make e2e
… it gets stuck at the until.... In the output of the job I just get “waiting for server…” over and over but the server doesn’t start and the tests don’t run. I get no output from nc (I do when I run it on the command line) and no output from either of @echo "e2e server is responding... or @echo "Running e2e tests... is shown.
If I invoke a slightly simpler make target in before_script: it runs, but it starts slowly and the tests fail because the server hasn’t started by the time I get to make e2e-localhost:
start-server-background:
@echo "Starting the server on port $(E2E_LOCAL_PORT)"
@E2E_LOCAL_PORT=$(E2E_LOCAL_PORT) \
DB_PROXY_ENDPOINT=$(DB_PROXY_ENDPOINT) \
DB_PROXY_PORT=$(DB_PROXY_PORT) \
DB_PROXY_USER=$(DB_PROXY_USER) \
DB_PROXY_PASS=$(DB_PROXY_PASS) \
DB_DATABASE=$(DB_DATABASE) \
go run integration/e2e/server/server.go &
# ...
e2e-localhost: ## Run the e2e target against default localhost
@echo "Running e2e tests against ${E2E_BASE_URL}"
E2E_BASE_URL=$(E2E_BASE_URL) go test integration/e2e
integration-tests:
# ...
before_script:
- make start-server-background
# ...
script:
- make e2e-localhost
I can find no official advice on how to start a server, wait until it has started accepting connections and then run tests against it. What is the supported way to do this?
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