1 Introduction

The Subplot library daemon for Python provides scenario steps and their implementations for running a background process and terminating at the end of the scenario.

This document explains the acceptance criteria for the library and how they’re verified. It uses the steps and functions from the lib/daemon library. The scenarios all have the same structure: run a command, then examine the exit code, verify the process is running.

2 Daemon is started and terminated

This scenario starts a background process, verifies it’s started, and verifies it’s terminated after the scenario ends.

3 Daemon takes a while to open its port

This scenario verifies that if the background process never starts listening on its port, the daemon library handles that correctly. We do this by using netcat to start a dummy daemon, after a short delay. The lib/daemon code will wait for netcat to open its port, by connecting to the port. It then closes the port, which causes netcat to terminate.

#!/bin/bash

set -euo pipefail

sleep 2
netcat -l 8888 > /dev/null
echo OK

4 Daemon never opens the intended port

This scenario verifies that if the background process never starts listening on its port, the daemon library handles that correctly.

5 Daemon stdout and stderr are retrievable

Sometimes it’s useful for the step functions to be able to retrieve the stdout or stderr of of the daemon, after it’s started, or even after it’s terminated. This scenario verifies that lib/daemon can do that.

We make for the daemon to exit, to work around a race condition: if the test program retrieves the daemon’s output too fast, it may not have had time to produce it yet.

#!/bin/bash

set -euo pipefail

trap 'exit 0' TERM

echo hola 1>&2
echo hi there