Openqa

A commen error when running tools/tidy in the openSUSE/SLES tests repository for openQA is the following error:

Wrong version of perltidy. Found '20211027', expected '20211029'.

This indicated a mismatch of the found vs. expected version of perltidy and the tidy script aborts to avoid inconsistent formatting between your PR and the CI pipeline. In Perl this is unfortunately necessary, as often a new version of perltidy formats the code differently. Yes, this is a source of constant struggle and one of the reasons why I dislike Perl (sorry for the mild rant).

Then using openqa-clone-job (and derivates) one can use the SCHEDULE variable to clone a test run with a custom set of test modules. This is particular useful, when developing a new test case and you need a verification run with e.g. an additional test module or to exclude some failing ones. However it is sometimes cumbersome to type out a large list of tests into a custom SCHEDULE variable, if the amount of test modules exceeds 5 or more tests (e.g. extra_tests_textmode - good luck!).

In this blog post I present you a small script, which can help you to remove empty job groups from your own openQA instance. This is helpful if you have a development instance with a lot of job groups, that you never use. This script can help you to tidy the list of dangling job groups.

Today we are going to play a bit around with the amazing API that every openQA instance provides. The aim of this tutorial is to show how the API can be accessed using a simple language like python. More advanced topics like job posting, deletion and other methods that require authentication are possible but not covered extensively in this post. The reference for this post will be openqa.opensuse.org, but everything works pretty much with every openQA instance.

Checkout the new openqa-cli cheat sheet page where I start to collect some useful “how do I do …” snippets for the openQA CLI utility openqa-cli.

I just recently discovered one of the hidden gems in the openQA WebUI: Show only failing tests in external results.

openqa-mon is a little command-line utility to monitor one or multiple openQA jobs for their status. This tool is useful if you want to live monitor a handful of jobs closely e.g. for verification runs.

In this blog post we are going to give you the easiest introduction to what needles are and how you can use them. While there are many good talks and documentation on needles out there, it took me longer than it should have to find a easy-to-use and easy-to-understand introduction into this topic alone. This blog post should fill this gap.