82.0 LTS

The Avocado team is proud to present another LTS (Long Term Stability) release: Avocado 82.0, AKA “Avengers: Endgame”, is now available!

LTS Release

For more information on what a LTS release means, please read RFC: Long Term Stability.

Upgrading from 69.x to 82.0

Upgrading Installations

Avocado is available on a number of different repositories and installation methods. You can find the complete details in Installing Avocado. After looking at your installation options, please consider the following when planning an in-place upgrade or a deployment version bump:

  • Avocado previously also supported Python 2, but it now supports Python 3 only. If your previous installation was based on Python 2, please consider that the upgrade path includes moving to Python 3. Dependency libraries, syntax changes, and maybe even the availability of a Python 3 interpreter are examples of things to consider.
  • No issues were observed when doing an in-place upgrade from Python 2 based Avocado 69.x LTS to Python 3 based Avocado 82.0 LTS.
  • When using Python’s own package management, that is, pip, simply switch to a Python 3 based pip (python3 -m pip is an option) and install the avocado-framework<83.0 package to get the latest release of the current LTS version.
  • When using RPM packages, please notice that there’s no package python-avocado anymore. Please use python3-avocado instead. The same is true for plugins packages, they all have the python3-avocado-plugins prefix.

Porting Tests (Test API compatibility)

If you’re migrating from the previous LTS version, these are the changes on the Test API that most likely will affect your test:

  • The avocado.main function isn’t available anymore. If you were importing it but not really executing the test script, simply remove it. If you need to execute Avocado tests as scripts, you need to resort to the Job API instead. See examples/jobs/passjob_with_test.py for an example.

Porting Tests (Utility API compatibility)

The changes in the utility APIs (those that live under the avocado.utils namespace are too many to present porting suggestion. Please refer to the Utility APIs section for a comprehensive list of changes, including new features your test may be able to leverage.

Changes from previous LTS

Note

This is not a collection of all changes encompassing all releases from 69.0 to 82.0. This list contains changes that are relevant to users of 69.0, when evaluating an upgrade to 82.0.

When compared to the last LTS (version 69.3), the main changes introduced by this versions are:

Users

  • Avocado can now run on systems with nothing but Python 3 (and “quasi-standard-library” module setuptools). This means that it won’t require extra packages, and should be easier to deploy on containers, embedded systems, etc. Optional plugins may have additional requirements.
  • Improved safeloader support for Python unit tests, including support for finding test classes that use multiple inheritances. As an example, Avocado’s safeloader is now able to properly find all of its own tests (almost 1000 of them).
  • Removal of old and redundant command-line options, such as --silent and --show-job-log in favor of --show=none and --show=test, respectively.
  • Job result categorization support, by means of the --job-category option to the run command, allows a user to create an easy to find directory, within the job results directory, for a given type of executed jobs.
  • The glib plugin got a configuration option for safe/unsafe operation, that is, whether it will execute binaries in an attempt to find the whole list of tests. Look for the glib.conf shipped with the plugin to enable the unsafe mode.
  • The HTML report got upgrades as pop-up whiteboard, filtering support and resizable columns.
  • When using the output check record features, duplicate files created by different tests/variants will be consolidated into unique files.
  • The new vmimage command allows a user to list the virtual machine images downloaded by means of avocado.utils.vmimage or download new images via the avocado vmimage get command.
  • The avocado assets fetch command now accepts a --ignore-errors option that returns exit code 0 even when some of the assets could not be fetched.
  • The avocado sysinfo feature file will now work out of the box on pip based installations.
  • The sysinfo collection now logs a much clearer message when a command is not found and thus can not have its output collected.
  • Users can now select which runner plugin will be used to run tests. To select a runner on the command line, use the --test-runner option. Please refer to avocado plugins to see the runner plugins available.
  • A new runner, called nrunner, has been introduced and has distinguishing features such as parallel test execution support either in processes or in Podman based containers.
  • A massive documentation overhaul, now designed around guides to different target audiences. The “User’s Guide”, “Test Writer’s Guide” and “Contributor’s Guide” can be easily found as first level sections containing curated content for those audiences.
  • It’s now possible to enforce colored or non-colored output, no matter if the output is a terminal or not. The configuration item color was introduced in the runner.output section, and recognizes the values auto, always, or never.
  • The jsonresult plugin added warn and interrupt fields containing counters for the tests that ended with WARN and INTERRUPTED status, respectively.
  • Avocado’s avocado.utils.software_manager functionality is now also made available as the avocado-software-manager command-line tool.
  • Avocado now supports “hint files” that can tweak how the Avocado resolver will recognize tests. This is useful for projects making use of Avocado as a test runner, and it can allow complete integration with a simple configuration file in a project repository. For more information check out the documentation.
  • The --ignore-missing-references option now takes no parameter. The feature it controls is not enabled unless you supply the command line option (but no on or off is required).
  • A brand new command, jobs, enables users to, among other things, list information about previously executed jobs. A command such as avocado jobs show will show the latest job information.
  • The remote, vm, and docker runner plugins were removed.
  • The multiplex command, an alias to variants, has been removed.
  • A new settings API that is tightly linked to the Job API. You can see all the existing configurations at runtime by running avocado config reference. To integrate Avocado to an existing project or a CI environment, a custom job with a few configurations will give you a lot of flexibility with very little need to write Python code. Some examples are available at examples/jobs.

Test Writers

  • Python 2 support has been removed. Support for Python versions include 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8. If you require Python 2 support, the 69.X LTS version should be used.
  • A fully usable Job API, making most of Avocado’s functionalities programmable and highly customizable.
  • Support for multiple test suites in a Job, so that each test suite can be configured differently and independently from each other. Fulfill your use case easily (or let your imagination go wild) and define different runners, different parameters to different test suites, or run some test suites locally, while others run isolated on containers. Anything that is configurable with the new settings API should be transparently configurable in the context of a test suite (provided the test suite deals with that feature).
  • A completely new implementation of the CIT Varianter plugin, now with support for constraints. Refer to CIT Varianter Plugin for more information.
  • The new avocado.cancel_on() decorator has been added to the Test APIs, allowing you to define the conditions for a test to be considered canceled. See one example here.
  • Avocado can now use tags inside Python Unittests, and not only on its own Instrumented tests.
  • The tags feature (see Categorizing tests) now supports an extended character set, adding . and - to the allowed characters. A tag such as :avocado: tags=machine:s390-ccw-virtio is now valid.
  • INSTRUMENTED tests using the avocado.Test.fetch_asset() can take advantage of plugins that will attempt to download (and cache) assets before the test execution. This should make the overall test execution more reliable, and give better test execution times as the download time will be excluded. Users can also manually execute the avocado assets command to manually fetch assets from tests.
  • The avocado.Test.fetch_asset() method now has two new parameters: find_only and cancel_on_missing. These can be combined to cancel tests if the asset is missing after a download attempt (find_only=False) or only if it’s present in the local system without a download having been attempted during the test (find_only=True). This can bring better determinism for tests that would download sizable assets, and/or allow test jobs to be executable in offline environments.
  • A new test type, TAP has been introduced along with a new loader and resolver. With a TAP test, it’s possible to execute a binary or script, similar to a SIMPLE test, and parse its Test Anything Protocol output to determine the test status.
  • The decorators avocado.skip(), avocado.skipIf(), and avocado.skipUnless() can now be used to decorate entire classes, resulting in all its tests getting skipped if/when the given condition is satisfied.
  • The “log level” of Avocado is now defined using the standard Python level names. If you have a custom configuration for this setting, you may need to adjust it.
  • The yaml_to_mux varianter plugin now attempts to respect the type of the value given to --mux-inject. For example, 1 is treated as an integer, a value of 1,2 is treated as a list, a value of abc is treated as a string, and a value of 1,2,5-10 is treated as a list of integers as 1,2,-5 (as it is evaluated by ast.literal_eval()).
  • For users of the Job API, a “dictionary-based” varianter was introduced, that allows you to describe the variations of tests in a test suite directly via a Python dictionary.
  • The avocado.utils.runtime module has been removed.
  • The test runner feature that would allow binaries to be run transparently inside GDB was removed. The reason for dropping such a feature has to do with how it limits the test runner to run one test at a time, and the use of the avocado.utils.runtime mechanism, also removed.
  • The “standalone job” feature was removed. The alternative is to use an Avocado Job (using the Job API), with a test defined on the same file, as can be seen on the example file examples/jobs/passjob_with_test.py in the source tree.

Utility APIs

Contributors

  • The Avocado configuration that is logged during a job execution is now the dictionary that is produced by the new avocado.core.settings module, instead of the configuration file(s) content. This is relevant because this configuration contains the result of everything that affects a job, such as defaults registered by plugins, command-line options, all in addition to the configuration file. The goal is to have more consistent behavior and increased job “replayability”.

Complete list of changes

For a complete list of changes between the last LTS release (69.3) and this release, please check out the Avocado commit changelog.