Testinfra is choosing Upstart for CentOS 6 as service provider

Hello,

I’ve been tracking down some failing tests and I’ve noticed that testinfra 1.6.5 is picking up the Upstart service provider for my test case for CentOS 6, which feels wrong and it should be choosing the SysvService instead.

Here’s an example:

    @pytest.mark.docker_images('centos:6')
    def test_httpd_service_starts_up_through_etc_initd(host, wait_for_svc):
        svc = host.run('/etc/init.d/httpd start')
        wait_for_svc(host, 'start', timeout=5)
    
        assert svc.rc == 0
>       assert host.service('httpd').is_running
E       AssertionError: assert False
E        +  where False = <service httpd>.is_running
E        +    where <service httpd> = <class 'testinfra.modules.base.UpstartService'>('httpd')
E        +      where <class 'testinfra.modules.base.UpstartService'> = <testinfra.host.Host object at 0x7fd013d85310>.service

[elliotweiser]

@codylane Thanks for the nod. These were the underlying motivations for my earlier comment:

1. Don’t reinvent the wheel over logic that Ansible has already painstakingly implemented
2. Less code to maintain (i.e. less tests to write and smaller code changes re: @codylane’s arguments)
3. There is already precedent to use Ansible library code in this code-base.

My opinion may be in the minority. I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts on the matter.

[codylane]

It’s not a hard requirement and is left to the package maintainer but most package maintainers do adhere to security requirements. Not all service bootstrapping has to happen from init but those that do should 98% of the time always be started from as the root user to avoid problems. If the service shouldn’t be run as root, the service should su the affective user and spawn the service with that user.

My point above only corresponds to this ticket which we are talking about a RHEL based distro that uses SysV startup scripts or Systemd. There are other init style based services with their own execution models but for the sake of this ticket and this potential bug, I feel that we should at the very least agree that anything service related through init or systemd should be invoked as root and make no other assumptions. Just my 2$. Feel free to disagree or provide different context.

I’m happy to share any other ideas or things to try.

A different context of thought:

If I was going to do a refactor of this of any kind, I would be looking to see what Ansible and Salt do as @elliotweiser suggests. I also wonder if it would be possible without to much work to just piggy back off the core library of Ansible or Salt and take advantage of fact gathering, service management… etc. I have a feeling this would be a significant re-write/refactor however. I may even explore this on my own fork.