Adventures in IT

Image: Pixabay If integration tests take too long to run then we stop running them because they're just an annoyance.  This is obviously not ideal and so getting my tests to run quickly is important. I'm busy writing a test suite for Laravel and wanted more flexibility than the built-in options that Laravel offers for working with databases between tests. Using the DataMigrations trait meant that my seed data would be lost after every test.  Migrating and seeding my entire database for every test in my suite is very time consuming. Even when using an in-memory sqlite database doing a complete migration and seed was taking several seconds on my dev box. If I used the DataTransactions trait then my migrations and seeds would never run and so my tests would fail because the fixture data is missing. My solution was to use a static variable in the base TestCase class that Laravel supplies.  It has to be static so that it retains its values between tests by the wa...

Jenkins is pretty easy to secure with the help of some useful plugins. The first that I suggest using is an oAuth provider.  Our repositories are hosted on Bitbucket so I'm using their oAuth, but there is also a Github oAuth plugin.  The instructions to set up the plugin are very clear (see the plugin page ). When you're configuring your Jenkins to use the oAuth security remember to leave the Authorization setting to "logged in users can do anything" for now.  We'll change this later, but we don't want to get locked out of Jenkins when we apply the security settings. Now install the plugin Role Based Authentication Strategy (see the plugin page ). Add a new group called "Anonymous" and uncheck everything. When a user logs into the oAuth they'll be given a message by Jenkins saying that they don't have any permissions.  This means that not everybody with a Bitbucket account can access your site so thats a good thing. You just need ...