LD.
Music, software, life… and stuff.
[ Twitter ] [ GitHub ] [ Linked In ]
Always developing Grails apps with https and testing against the WAR
In response to a number of bugs creeping through to production due to classpath differences and ssl issues, I went about setting up my culprit grails app to always functionally test as a war and with https in both development and testing. Here’s how to do it.
It turns out that there are two bugs/issues with the current grails tomcat plugin that get in the way of this objective, so you’ll have to install the
1.3.7.1version of the tomcat plugin which fixes GRAILS-6688 and GRAILS-7488 for Grails 1.3.x (these issues will be fixed for Grails 1.4).
Always support https
This is quite simple, but perhaps a little tricky to work out. Simply put the following in your scripts/_Events.groovy…
eventParseArgumentsEnd = {
argsMap.https = true
}
That’s the only suitable hook that I have found that can be used to force https to be used all the time (i.e. run-app and test-app). It’s a little heavy, but I’m yet to find a situation where it causes an issue.
Always functionally testing with a WAR
Again, this is simple. The following goes in scripts/_Events.groovy…
eventAllTestsStart = {
testOptions.war = true
}
This is equivalent to always passing the -war argument to test-app.
Functional tests and SSL (trust)
Depending on how you are functionally testing (and you know you should be using Geb + Spock) you may have issues with the certificate that Grails will generate for you to serve https. Namely, you might need to go and configure trust settings in all of your functional test browsers etc. If you have multiple CI builds then you are going to have to do this for a lot of certs. Even worse, the cert that Grails generates is stored in the work dir so can be wiped out at any time.
You can minimise this pain by generating your own cert and having Grails use that when serving https instead of creating one on demand. To do this, you need the following two settings in BuildConfig.groovy…
grails.tomcat.keystorePath = "${basedir}/grails-app/conf/httpsKeystore"
grails.tomcat.keystorePassword = "secret"
You of course need to create this keystore with a cert in it, which you can do (in grails-app/conf) via…
keytool -genkey -alias localhost -dname CN=localhost,OU=Test,O=Test,C=US -keyalg RSA -validity 365 -storepass key -keystore httpsKeystore -storepass secret -keypass secret
You now only need to make sure the browser trusts this cert.
Why bother?
In my case, we were hitting some dependency issues that were due to the development and production classpaths being different so running functional tests against a war minimises this risk because the app is then run in a separate JVM without the Grails build time classpath, making it more production like.
The application that we were having problems with uses mixed http and https and is also reasonably AJAX heavy. Several issues had crept through with AJAX requests being made on secure pages to non secure pages (which will blow up due to the browser not being willing to compromise security by making the unsecure request).
These two relatively simple steps get you closer to a production environment if you don’t have the resourcing, manpower, will etc. to setup an elaborate QA environment for automated testing.
Posted: May 6th, 2011 @ 1:54 pm
