cacert-codedocs/source/devtest.rst

Build yourself a CAcert Test Machine for Development

As developers, at some point we all need a machine, whether for raw development, Unit Testing, Integration or System Testing, so that we can be assured that our code is ready to submit to the Software Reviewers and Approvers on its way to deployment in Production.

That machine should be structured and configured to be as close a match as possible to CAcert's production servers.

I have written this document and prepared scripts and other tools to help other Developers easily create such a machine for their own purposes.

At present the machine that we are trying to match is a very old Debian machine with PHP 5 installed. Since we can no longer install a version of Debian that is as old as is running in Production, I found that Debian 8 would still install, at least at present, and PHP 5.7 can still be installed on that version of Debian.

Assumptions and Expectations

This document will describe the use of VirtualBox to create a working copy of CAcert's Test Server for use in development of bug fixes and other code intended for deployment to CAcert's servers.

It will describe all of the pieces that were used to create a working Debian 8 system, complete with various helper tools that allow this system to be used in a stand-alone manner, effectively air-gapped from the Internet and E-Mail.

Since the CAcert code makes use of E-Mail for validating users and other internal purposes, this code must trap any outgoing e-mail so that it can be examined and then returned to the system to fulfil those validation purposes.

For future code development, much of this instruction can be repeated, with principally, replacement of the Debian ISO and, therefore, upgrade of the database server within.

Software Development and Code Submission in CAcert

For those who are unfamiliar, there is a good document in the CAcert code tree, describing the process of managing the code involved in a CAcert bug fix or feature submission. The current version can be found at Contributing. Please note that you should only make the minimum code changes necessary for each Pull Request ( PR ), to assist the people involved in QA and Software Assesment.

Pre-requisites

• Internet connection

  • Not for testing, but for obtaining the software that we are putting into our virtual machine.

• VirtualBox¹

  • Remember that the OS of the host system does not have to match the OS of the virtual machine.

• ISO of Debian 8 or older, if possible.²³

  • I was not able to install Debian 7, because of its repository requirement.⁴

• Membership in the CAcert Development group and Mailing List: cacert-devel@lists.cacert.org.
• Access to our Bug Tracker Mantis.

Everything else that I installed, I will provide in the instructions.

Create a running Debian

VirtualBox

For those of us familiar with VirtualBox, this is relatively straight-forward. I will try to ease the path for the others. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me and other CAcert developers on the CAcert Developers mailing list cacert-devel@lists.cacert.org.

VirtualBox can be found as an installable package for most modern systems, whether Linux, as I run, MacOS ( OS X ) or Windows, as well as Solaris!⁵

For our purposes, most modern machines, including laptops, can run VirtualBox and our Development VM.

Debian Versions

Since CAcert's current production systems are running on ten-year-old versions of Debian, for any bug fixing or enhancements to the current system, we need to try and reproduce that environment as much as possible.

For that reason, I am specifying Debian 8, Jessie, as our standard Development Environment, since it is the oldest still supported version of Debian. If absolutely necessary, we could experiment by downloading older CD versions of Debian, but for now, let us use Jessie.

Creating our Development and Test Platform

If you have not yet installed VirtualBox, do so now.

Then create a new VM, using the default values offered by VirtualBox. When asked about memory, allocate at least 1GB, but no more than half of the memory installed in the host machine. Disks will normally be created as compressed devices, so that you will not use as much as you select for the disk size except under exceptional circumstances.

Mount the Debian ISO, and start the VM.

First Installation Steps

• Aptitude

  • I prefer the command line version of aptitude to apt-get, so install it on every machine that I build.

  • Once it has been installed, do:

    • aptitude update
    • aptitude safe-upgrade

  • And then install the following tools with "aptitude install vim git rsync"

• Vim
• Git
• Rsync
• Others?

• Create a working directory

  • mkdir work

• Create a source directory

  • mkdir cacert

Installing PHP 5.7

• Add Sources.list file

  - Since PHP 5 is not normally provided by Debian 8, we need to make use of a repository provided by Ondrej Sury. He has been creating and supporting various versions of PHP ( and a few other related packages ) for Debian and Ubuntu for quite a few years. These currently range from PHP 5.6 through the whole PHP 7.x range.

  • Perform the following steps:

    • cd work
    • sudo apt install ca-certificates apt-transport-https
    • wget -q https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
    • sudo echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ jessie main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list

• Installing PHP

  • aptitude update
  • aptitude install php5.6 php5.6-cli php5.6-common php5.6-curl php5.6-mbstring php5.6-mysqlnd php5.6-xml

Installing Mail and MailHog

• Configuring Exim4

  • cd /etc/exim4
  • vim update-exim4.conf.conf
  • find line with dc_smarthost
  • insert localhost::1025 between quotes
  • Save and Exit

  • Restart Exim by service exim4 restart

    • This will compile the configuration file

• Downloading MailHog and Installing
• Finishing Configuration

Apache

• Editing Virtual Host

Installing Required Environment Variables

• Deciding on values
• Editing Apache Virtual Host

Editing PHP.ini

Installing Test Manager

Installing Source Code

Any More Steps

Starting Development

Starting MailHog

Etc

Footnotes

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1. VirtualBox can be obtained either from a Linux distribution repository or directly from VirtualBox.↩︎

2. You can download Debian ISOs from Debian, but finding older ones, such as the one that we want, can be a bit tricky. I use the NetInst version because it is much smaller, and therefore quicker to download, but might be a bit longer to install than a full DVD copy. Note that while the NetInst version is less than 300 MB, there are three DVD images, totalling about 13 GB! On the other hand, the NetInst version depends on a working Debian Mirror, while the CD or DVD images might be able to be installed without that requirement. We might want to experiment.↩︎

3. Note that the source for Debian CD and DVD images older that the current version is Debian Archive. The NetInst version can be found in the iso-cd directory.↩︎

4. I did try downloading the DVD image for Debian 6, Squeeze, and created a Virtual Box VM using that. It was 4.2 GB, so took a while to download. I only downloaded DVD-1, instead of the whole set, and, in fact the DVD named debian-update-6.0.10-amd64-DVD-1.iso. Further information about creating the Debian 6.10 VM can be found in DevTest 6.↩︎

5. VirtualBox can be obtained either from a Linux distribution repository or directly from VirtualBox.↩︎