FakeChrootFixture

This package provides a fixtures compatible fixture for building and executing integration tests in a copy-on-write chroot environment without requiring the tests to be run as root.

In order to use it you will need fakeroot, fakechroot and cowdancer.

This code was extracted and refactored from the test harness within Yaybu.

So what does it do then?

The first test to use the fixture will create (or refresh) a chroot. We use fakechroot magic to do this in userspace without root. Each test is then run in a cheap copy of this chroot. So each test gets its own clean (and fresh) chroot.

This chroot is perfect for testing. You can perform actions against a seeming complete system and at the same time poke and prod at it from outside.

How do I use it?

Something like this:

import unittest2
from fakechroot import TestCase

class TestInAChroot(TestCase):
    def test_true(self):
        retval = self.chroot.call(["/bin/true"])
        self.failUnlessEqual(retval, 0)

What other cool API's are there?

The fixture object has a bunch of API helpers on it so you can write your tests as though they were in the chroot. All the calls below will take a path in the chroot (such as /foo) and operate on the fully expanded path (which might be /home/john/Projects/myproject/tmp2234a/foo).

These were added as Yaybu needed them - patches for more are welcome.

FakeChrootFixture.call

Executes a command inside the chroot with the appropriate LD_PRELOAD setup.

FakeChrootFixture.exists

Returns True if a path inside the chroot exists.

FakeChrootFixture.isdir

Returns True is a path in the chroot is a directory.

FakeChrootFixture.mkdir

Creates a directory inside the chroot.

FakeChrootFixture.open

Returns a file inside the chroot for read or write operations.

FakeChrootFixture.touch

Runs the touch binary inside the chroot.

FakeChrootFixture.chmod

Runs the chmod binary inside the chroot. We can't directly use os.chmod as it doesn't notify faked about the change.

FakeChrootFixture.readlink

Grabs the value of a symlink. As this can contain the entire path of the chroot we strip off the chroot path.

FakeChrootFixture.symlink

Actually creates a symlink within the chroot.

FakeChrootFixture.stat

Performs an os.stat on the path.

How does it work?

This works through a trio of LD_PRELOAD libs that essentially monkey patch the chroot to think they have more privileged access than they do.

The fakeroot package is used to fool your code into thinking it is root and that changes it is making as root (such as chmod, for example) are taking effect. A special faked daemon is used to coordinate this between processes.

The fakechroot package is used to fool your code into thinking that the chroot syscall worked. This means that any code perform file operations is tricked at a syscall level into acting on ~/yourchroot/tmp/foo when it innocently thinks it just touched /tmp/foo.

The cowdancer package is what provides copy-on-write in userspace. The only requirement is a filesystem that supports hard links. You create a copy on your base image with cp -al. This creates a farm of hardlinks. The cowdancer patches then force any changes that would have been written to the base image to be written into a new file (thus breaking the hard link).

What are the limitations?

Your code only thinks it has root. So you can't bind port 80 or anything like that.

Right now we only actively support Ubuntu. In particular, we are only actively testing with Lucid and Precise. Whilst other Unixes may be supported in future support for OS X is unfortunately unlikely (there is nothing like debootstrap) and Windows doesn't have the concept of chroots.

There is some overhead to using a system like this. We have tuned some of this away (for example, we setup the LD_PRELOAD stuff by hand to shave 3 process invocations per .call()), but you are still introducing a fair bit of indirection. You won't be running hundreds of test cases per second.

All three libraries on their own are clever hacks. They are heavily used in Debian, but they likely still have bugs. And when combined together those bugs are likely magnified. This fixture will let you run some tests that might have previously required root as a normal user, thus avoid running the code you just utterly broke as root. But that's still enough power to wipe ~!

What are the alternatives?

Running your code in a VM is the best test, but even with snapshots running each test in a clean environment would be a pain.

There have been lots of advances in Kernel namespacing. LXC could be a suitable alternative - it depends on your use case.