39.0 The Hateful Eight

The Avocado team is proud to present another incremental release: version 39.0, aka, “The Hateful Eight”, is now available!

Release documentation: Avocado 39.0

The major changes introduced on this version are listed below.

  • Support for running tests in Docker container. Now, in addition to running tests on a (libvirt based) Virtual Machine or on a remote host, you can now run tests in transient Docker containers. The usage is as simple as:

    $ avocado run mytests.py --docker ldoktor/fedora-avocado
    

    The container will be started, using ldoktor/fedora-avocado as the image. This image contains a Fedora based system with Avocado already installed, and it’s provided at the official Docker hub.

  • Introduction of the “Fail Fast” feature.

    By running a job with the --failfast flag, the job will be interrupted after the very first test failure. If your job only makes sense if it’s a complete PASS, this feature can save you a lot of time.

  • Avocado supports replaying previous jobs, selected by using their Job IDs. Now, it’s also possible to use the special keyword latest, which will cause Avocado to rerun the very last job.

  • Python’s standard signal handling is restored for SIGPIPE, and thus for all tests running on Avocado.

    In previous releases, Avocado introduced a change that set the default handler to SIGPIPE, which caused the application to be terminated. This seemed to be the right approach when testing how the Avocado app would behave on broken pipes on the command line, but it introduced side effects to a lot of Python code. Instead of exceptions, the affected Python code would receive the signal themselves.

    This is now reverted to the Python standard, and the signal behavior of Python based tests running on Avocado should not surprise anyone.

  • The project release notes are now part of the official documentation. That means that users can quickly find when a given change was introduced.

Together with those changes listed, a total of 38 changes made into this release. For more information, please check out the complete Avocado changelog.

Release Meeting

The Avocado release meetings are now open to the community via Hangouts on Air. The meetings are recorded and made available on the Avocado Test Framework YouTube channel.

For this release, you can watch the meeting on this link.