Debugging 389ds tests

03 Aug 2015

Debugging 389ds tests

I've always found when writing tests for 389ds that's it's really handy to have the ldif of data and the logs from a unit test available. However, by default, these are stored.

I discovered that if you add instance.backupFS() just before your instance.delete() you can keep a full dump of the data and logs from the instance.

It can also be useful to call db2ldif before you run the backup so that you have a human readable copy of the data on hand as well.

I've found the best pattern is:

def tearDown(self):
    if self.instance.exists():
        self.instance.db2ldif(bename='userRoot', suffixes=[DEFAULT_SUFFIX], excludeSuffixes=[], encrypt=False, \
            repl_data=False, outputfile='%s/ldif/%s.ldif' % (self.instance.dbdir,INSTANCE_SERVERID ))
        self.instance.clearBackupFS()
        self.instance.backupFS()
        self.instance.delete()

This puts an ldif dump of the DB into the backup path, we then clear old backups for our test instance (else it won't over-write them), finally, we actually do the backup. You should see:

snip ...
DEBUG:lib389:backupFS add = /var/lib/dirsrv/slapd-effectiverightsds/ldif/effectiverightsds.ldif (/)
snip ...
INFO:lib389:backupFS: archive done : /tmp/slapd-effectiverightsds.bck/backup_08032015_092510.tar.gz

Then you can extract this in /tmp/slapd-instance, and examine your logs and the ldif of what was really in your ldap server at the time.