Operations

The Elections module uses the authority identification keys included in the bulletin board repository for development and testing purposes. This means that a development or test application should be able to communicate with a seeded bulletin board application with no configuration necessary.

The use of the bulletin board clients in the Elections component and the Votings participatory space is tested mainly using unit tests, where the server response is mocked. But there are also some system tests where mocking the server response is almost impossible. The only way to execute those tests is using a real instance of the bulletin board. But new challenges appeared when trying to run both systems in the repository CI tool.

Having the whole Bulletin Board environment configured and working inside the CI machines can be complex and hard to maintain. Thus, we use the Docker image published during the release of the version used by the bulletin board client. This image is used in the workflow’s definition to simplify the process. Its version should be changed when updating the version of the bulletin board client.

In addition, after each test, the bulletin board should be reset to start with some test data ready to be used. A ResetTestDatabaseMutation is defined to support this, but it is only allowed if the Rails application is running in test mode. This mutation should be called before running each test, to be sure that the database seed data is again at its starting state. A RSpec shared context is defined to do that in the Elections component.