Writing AutoQA Events and Watchers

This page is a draft only
It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.

Overview

The hooks/ directory in the autoqa source tree contains the hooks that AutoQA knows about. A hook has five main parts:

1. README
   • describes the event itself and the required (and optional) arguments that will be passed along to the tests.
2. hook.py
   • python code that is used to parse the test arguments, as described in the README file. This is the formal definition of the test arguments.
3. testlist
   • contains the list of test names that will be launched when this hook is triggered.
4. control.template and test_class_template.py
   • generic templates for creating new tests that use this hook. See below for more information on writing new tests.
5. Watcher
   • This is the code that watches for the event and launches the autoqa harness with the arguments described in README and hook.py.
   • Currently, all existing watchers are scripts that get run periodically by crond to check to see if the event has occurred since the last time it was run. If so, it launches autoqa.
   • In the future this will change to a daemon that waits for notifications about the event - see the Messaging SIG's Publish Subscribe Notification Proposal for further info about that.