Automate QA Tests For Website Deployments

Hey guys! Automating Quality Assurance (QA) tests after website deployments is super important for ensuring everything runs smoothly. This article dives into how you can set up a script to automatically verify key URLs and content on your stage and production environments. This will help catch any issues early and save you a ton of time and effort in the long run. Let's get started!

Why Automate QA Tests?

Automated QA testing is crucial for maintaining the reliability and performance of your website, especially after deployments. Manual testing can be time-consuming and prone to human error. Automating the process ensures that essential functionalities are checked consistently and rapidly. By implementing automated tests, you can quickly identify and resolve issues before they impact users, leading to a smoother user experience and greater confidence in your deployments. Furthermore, automation allows for frequent testing, such as weekly checks on staging environments and immediate post-deployment checks on production environments, providing continuous validation of your website's health. This proactive approach minimizes downtime and enhances overall site quality. Setting up automated tests means less fire-fighting and more time focusing on new features and improvements. This article provides a guide on how to implement this, making your website deployment process more efficient and dependable. Automating these processes not only saves time but also helps ensure that your website remains stable and performs optimally, ultimately contributing to better user satisfaction and business outcomes.

The Goal: A Simple, Effective Script

The main goal is to create a simple script that automates the verification of key URLs and content on your website after deployments. This script will use curl or wget commands to check specific URLs, verify the HTTP status code (expecting a 200 OK), and confirm that the content contains certain expected words. The script should be easy to run with a single command, providing a quick health check for both stage and production environments. By bypassing the CDN during these tests, we can directly assess the server's response, ensuring that any issues are not masked by cached content. This approach will give you confidence in your deployments, reduce the risk of unexpected errors, and free up valuable time for other tasks. The idea is to make this as straightforward as possible so that anyone on the team can easily run the checks and understand the results. Automating these basic checks can significantly improve your deployment process and overall website reliability. Plus, it helps catch problems before your users do, which is always a win!

Key URLs to Test

Identifying the key URLs to test is a foundational step in creating an effective automated QA script. These URLs should represent critical sections of your website that must function correctly to ensure a positive user experience. For example, you should include the /news/ and /releases/ pages to verify that the latest updates are being displayed correctly. Testing the /libraries/ page ensures that users can access and navigate the list of available libraries. Specific documentation pages, such as https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_89_0/doc/html/boost_asio/examples.html, should also be included to confirm that important resources are accessible. Additionally, it is beneficial to include URLs that test for common issues, such as the presence of a missing final slash, like https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_89_0/libs/json/doc/html. Randomly selecting URLs can also help uncover unexpected problems across different parts of the site. By carefully selecting these URLs, you can create a comprehensive test suite that covers the most critical aspects of your website. Remember, the goal is to catch any potential issues before they impact your users. Regular review and updates to this list will ensure that your automated tests remain relevant and effective.

Scripting with curl or wget

Using curl or wget commands in a script is a straightforward way to automate QA tests for your website. These command-line tools are excellent for sending HTTP requests and verifying responses. Here's how you can structure your script:

1. Setting up the Script: Start by creating a shell script (e.g., qa_test.sh).
2. Defining URLs: Define an array of URLs to test. This can include your /news/, /releases/, /libraries/ pages, specific documentation pages, and URLs to test for issues like missing final slashes.
3. Looping Through URLs: Use a for loop to iterate through each URL in the array.
4. Executing curl or wget: Inside the loop, use curl -I or wget --spider to send a HEAD request to each URL. This retrieves the HTTP status code without downloading the entire page content, making the test faster.
5. Verifying Status Code: Check if the status code is 200 (OK). You can use grep to find the HTTP status code in the output and then use an if statement to verify it.
6. Content Verification: For specific URLs, you can download the content using curl -s or wget -q -O- and then use grep to check if the content contains a certain word or phrase.
7. Bypassing CDN: To bypass the CDN, use the server's IP address in the command. You can add the IP address and domain name to your /etc/hosts file temporarily for the test.
8. Reporting: Print the results to the console, indicating whether each test passed or failed. You can also log the results to a file for future reference.

Here’s a basic example:

#!/bin/bash

URLS=(
  "https://www.boost.org/news/"
  "https://www.boost.org/releases/"
  "https://www.boost.org/libraries/"
  "https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_89_0/doc/html/boost_asio/examples.html"
)

for URL in "${URLS[@]}"; do
  STATUS=$(curl -I -s $URL | grep "HTTP/1.1" | awk '{print $2}')
  if [ "$STATUS" -eq 200 ]; then
    echo "Success: $URL - Status: $STATUS"
  else
    echo "Failure: $URL - Status: $STATUS"
  fi
done

This script provides a foundation that you can expand upon to include more sophisticated checks and reporting. Remember to make the script executable with chmod +x qa_test.sh.

CDN Bypass: Testing the Origin Server

Bypassing the CDN is crucial when you want to test the origin server directly, ensuring that the content and functionality are working as expected without any caching interference. To bypass the CDN, you can modify your local /etc/hosts file to point the domain name directly to the server's IP address. Here’s how:

1. Find the Server IP: Identify the IP address of your stage or production server. For stage, it’s 34.120.246.69, and for production, it’s 35.190.118.110.
2. Edit the /etc/hosts File: Open the /etc/hosts file with root privileges using a text editor (e.g., sudo nano /etc/hosts).
3. Add an Entry: Add a line to the file in the format IP_ADDRESS DOMAIN_NAME. For example, to test the stage environment, add the line 34.120.246.69 www.boost.org.
4. Save the File: Save the changes and exit the text editor.
5. Run the Test: Execute your curl or wget commands. These commands will now bypass the CDN and directly access the origin server.
6. Revert Changes: After testing, remember to remove or comment out the entry in the /etc/hosts file to restore normal CDN functionality.

By bypassing the CDN, you can verify that the origin server is serving the correct content and that any issues are not due to caching problems. This is particularly useful after deployments to ensure that the latest changes are correctly reflected on the server.

Expected Results and Content Verification

Verifying the expected results and content of your QA tests is critical to ensuring that your website functions correctly after deployments. Beyond just checking the HTTP status code, you should also verify that the content contains specific words or phrases that indicate the page is displaying the correct information. This involves downloading the content of the page and searching for these keywords using tools like grep. For example, if you're testing the /news/ page, you might want to ensure that the latest news article's title is present. For documentation pages, you could verify that specific code examples or important phrases are included.

To implement this, you can modify your script to download the page content using curl -s or wget -q -O- and then pipe the output to grep. Here’s an example:

CONTENT=$(curl -s "https://www.boost.org/news/" | grep "Latest News Article Title")
if [ -n "$CONTENT" ]; then
  echo "Content verification passed for /news/"
else
  echo "Content verification failed for /news/"
fi

In this example, the script downloads the content of the /news/ page and searches for the phrase "Latest News Article Title". If the phrase is found, the content verification passes; otherwise, it fails. By incorporating content verification into your automated QA tests, you can significantly increase the reliability of your deployments and catch issues that might not be apparent from just the HTTP status code.

Scheduling and Frequency

Determining the appropriate scheduling and frequency for your automated QA tests is essential to maintaining the health and reliability of your website. Ideally, you should run these tests at multiple points in your deployment cycle:

1. Pre-Deployment Checks: Before deploying to production, run the script against the staging environment to ensure that everything is generally fine. This helps catch any issues early before they make their way to the live site.
2. Post-Deployment Checks: Immediately after deploying to production, run the script to verify that the deployment was successful and that all key functionalities are working as expected. This is crucial for quickly identifying and resolving any issues that may arise during the deployment process.
3. Weekly Checks: In addition to pre- and post-deployment checks, schedule the script to run weekly against both the staging and production environments. This provides continuous monitoring and helps catch any issues that may develop over time.

To automate the scheduling, you can use tools like cron on Linux or Task Scheduler on Windows. Here’s an example of how to set up a cron job to run the script every Monday at 9:00 AM:

0 9 * * 1 /path/to/your/qa_test.sh

By implementing a well-defined scheduling strategy, you can ensure that your website is continuously monitored and that any issues are identified and addressed promptly. This proactive approach helps maintain a high level of quality and reliability.

Conclusion

Alright, folks! By automating your QA tests with a simple script using curl or wget, you can ensure your website stays in tip-top shape after every deployment. Remember to test key URLs, bypass the CDN to check the origin server directly, and verify that the content contains the expected information. Setting up pre- and post-deployment checks, along with weekly monitoring, will keep your site running smoothly and your users happy. Happy testing, and may your deployments always be successful!

For more information on website testing and deployment strategies, check out this comprehensive guide on continuous integration and continuous deployment.