DEV Community: Kherin Bundhoo

Running Postman Collections in Azure Pipelines

Kherin Bundhoo — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 16:09:54 +0000

Introduction

Running a set of Postman collections within a dedicated Azure Pipeline provides the ability to automate API testing of Development, Testing and even Staging environments with minimal manual intervention. Furthermore, through the use of regular runs, it encourages the adoption of the shift-left approach:

test early and often

Hence, teams can detect regressions and bugs early in the development lifecycle.

Create Postman Collection

The first step is to gather your Postman API requests under the same Collection. In this example, the collection is named Post-Office. Under the Tests tab, there is a simple assertion which verifies the expected status code returned after the API call.

Note: The endpoint *-foo.com is only an illustrative example and you should replace it with your own in your current context.

Create environments + variables

Ensure that you have created corresponding Postman Environments for the different contexts in which your code is being deployed to. Environments provide a way to organize variables which are only relevant for a specific context (API keys, external web-services, etc...).

Export the collection

You can export the relevant Postman Collection by hovering over it on the sidebar and clicking on the "..." (View more actions). Finally click on Export

A file with a default filename of *.postman_collection.json (in this case Post-Office.postman_collection.json) will be downloaded

Export Postman Environment Variables

Go to the Environments tab on the side bar, then click on the "..." and finally select export.

Create a new Pipeline

Once you have exported the collection and environment json files, ensure that you push them to the repository of your web app on Azure DevOps.

Now it is time for some plumbing! The task is to create a new pipeline that will execute your Postman collection scripts automatically.

Go to Pipelines and click on New. Select the classic editor.

Add Tasks

Task 1: Install newman package

For the first job, we will be using the newman package from npm to execute our postman collection.

Newman is a command-line Collection Runner for Postman. It enables you to run and test a Postman Collection directly from the command line.

-- https://learning.postman.com/docs/running-collections/using-newman-cli/command-line-integration-with-newman/

Task 2: Execute Postman Collection

To execute the postman collection with newman, we will need to provide the following command:


 newman run sample-collection.json -e env.postman_environment.json

The first argument of the newman run is the file path of your postman collection. The option -e take as input the file path of the Postman Environment file.

Making use of Pipeline variables

In the previous screenshot, we can see that we have hardcoded the environment filename for the option -e:



newman run sample-collection.json -e env.postman_environment.json

Instead of specifying directly the environment filename within the command, we can leverage the use of Pipeline variables.
We create a variable CUSTOM.ENVIRONMENT_FILE to store the filename.

We can then reference the variable inside the command as follows:



# Navigate to postman directory
DESTINATION='$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/postman'
cd $DESTINATION

# Absolute path for environment file
ENVIRONMENT_FILE='$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/postman/environments/$(CUSTOM.ENVIRONMENT_FILE)'

newman run collections/Post-Office.postman_collection.json -e $ENVIRONMENT_FILE

After the execution of the Postman Collection, the results of all tests and requests can be exported into a custom file.
This is made possible through the use of reporters. In our case, we will use a JUNIT reporter to export the test results to a custom file.



newman run collections/Post-Office.postman_collection.json  -e $ENVIRONMENT_FILE --reporters cli,junit --reporter-junit-export test-results/outputfile.xml

outputfile.xml represents the custom file where you want to collect the test results.

View more about custom reporters here: Newman Custom Reporters

Task 3: Publish Test Results

The final step is to publish the test results and view the results on the Tests tab of the pipeline.

Add the Publish Test Results task.

View the test results on the Tests tab

That's its folks! Thank you 😃

References

Using Octave kernel in a Jupyter Notebook

Kherin Bundhoo — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 08:01:01 +0000

This is a lightning-quick 💫 tutorial on how to link the Octave kernel with a Jupyter Notebook.

Requirements:

Python >= 3.5
Anaconda 4.10.1

Installation

In your command line, navigate to your project folder and activate your Anaconda environment

Install the octave_kernel package using conda install -c conda-forge octave_kernel

Configuration

Run Jupyter Notebook inside your workspace and open your browser. Within the file explorer page, on the right-hand-side, select Octave from the New dropdown.

This will create a new notebook which is linked to the Octave kernel and which enables you to execute Octave syntax within the code cells.

Setting Graphics Toolkit

To be able to display graph plots within the notebook, you will need to indicate which graphics toolkit you want the script to use before rendering the plots. (In this example, we are using the gnuplot graphics toolkit)

Add the following line to top of your code:

graphics_toolkit ("gnuplot");

References

https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/octave_kernel
Image Cover: https://picsum.photos

Import Project to CodeSanbox.io via GitHub Action

Kherin Bundhoo — Sat, 27 Mar 2021 12:58:14 +0000

Hello Everyone!

In this post I am going to show you how I was able to generate a link to automatically import your current project to CodeSandbox.

📠 Import

According to its documentation, CodeSandbox has a way to automatically import a project (templates) from a GitHub repository to its online IDE by simply modifying the GitHub URL of the repository.

Using GitHubBox.com
An easy way to import a repo to CodeSandbox via URL is with GitHubBox.com. Append 'box' to your github.com URL in between 'hub' and '.com' and it will redirect to CodeSandbox.

Here's an example:

Change the GitHub URL: https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/tree/master/examples/todomvc.

To: https://githubbox.com/reduxjs/redux/tree/master/examples/todomvc.

The result is we take the last part of the url (everything after github.com) and use it in our importer at codesandbox.io/s/github/, adding the repo to CodeSandbox.

Github Action

Hence, I created a Github Action that will concatenate the GithubBox.com url to the path of the branch for each newly-created pull request.

📚 Reason

Generating a url to an online playground for each pull request created can enhance the review process by:

instantaneously generating a sandbox for each branch, therefore shortening the visual feedback loop
providing the ability to play around with the code and provide better code suggestions

Workflow

Here's the code of the workflow file you need to add to your project.

"on":
  - pull_request
jobs:
  annotate_pull_request:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: perform annotation
    steps:
      - name: annotation action step
        id: annotation
        uses: kherin/pr-comment-action@v1.0.1
        with:
          annotation-url: "https://githubbox.com/"
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

💼 Usage

PR Comment

Online Playground

✨ GitHub Action

The source code can be found here:

kherin / pr-comment-action

This action annotates the description section of a newly-created pull request with a comment

Review App Action

This action adds a new comment to a newly-created pull request when it is created for the firs time.

Type:

JavaScript Action

`annotation-url`

The URL of the review app which is linked to the code branch of the newly-created pull request

Purpose

Integration with CodeSanbox

You can easily import a new pull request for an Angular/React/Vue project to CodeSanbox

An easy way to import a repo to CodeSandbox via URL is with GitHubBox.com. Append 'box' to your github.com URL in between 'hub' and '.com' and it will redirect to CodeSandbox. CodeSanbox Documentation

Example usage

uses: actions/pr-comment-action@v1 with: annotation-url: 'https://location-of-demo-app.com'

View on GitHub

DEV Community: Kherin Bundhoo

Running Postman Collections in Azure Pipelines

Introduction

Create Postman Collection

Create environments + variables

Export the collection

Export Postman Environment Variables

Create a new Pipeline

Add Tasks

Task 1: Install newman package

Task 2: Execute Postman Collection

Making use of Pipeline variables

Task 3: Publish Test Results

References

Using Octave kernel in a Jupyter Notebook

Installation

Configuration

Setting Graphics Toolkit

References

Import Project to CodeSanbox.io via GitHub Action

📠 Import

Github Action

📚 Reason

Workflow

💼 Usage

PR Comment

Online Playground

✨ GitHub Action

kherin / pr-comment-action

This action annotates the description section of a newly-created pull request with a comment

Review App Action

Type:

annotation-url

Purpose

Integration with CodeSanbox

Example usage

👋 Goodbye World

References

`annotation-url`