There's a new chapter out on "Integration Testing", which brings the book to ≈60% complete:
This chapter is a reprise of an older blog post of mine on NixOS tests. The main difference is that the example and prose have been heavily edited to change the emphasis on what is being taught. Back then the blog post focused more on building up to the actual NixOS test step-by-step (assuming less prior knowledge), whereas this chapter leads pretty early with the complete integration test and focuses more on advanced tips and tricks that weren't covered in the original blog post, including:
- How to run a test interactively using the
driverInteractiveattribute - How to idiomatically define shared constants used throughout the test
- How to factor out configuration files into standalone files while still interpolating Nix variables
The actual prose didn't take long to write (because most of the hard work in coming up with a compelling example was already done by my prior blog post). The thing that actually took time was getting this all working on macOS, which was a pretty heavy lift:
As always, if you find any issues (typos, bugs in the code) feel free to report an issue.
When you buy my book you're not just paying for my writing but all the supporting open source work I do to streamline the Nix/NixOS ecosystem to support the text of the book.