Dependencies

The Docker tests have a number of dependencies which are important to understand when making changes or debugging problems.

Third-Party Libraries

As described in the Docker section, the Docker image contains Druid plus three external dependencies:

  • The MySQL client library
  • The MariaDB client library
  • The Kafka protobuf provider

These libraries are not shipped with Druid itself. Instead, we add them to the image as follows:

  • Dependencies are listed in the test-image/pom.xml file.
  • Maven fetches the dependencides from an upstream repo and places them into the local Maven cache.
  • The test-image/pom.xml file uses the maven-dependency-plugin to copy these dependencies from the local repo into the target/docker directory.
  • The Dockerfile copies the dependencies into the /usr/local/druid/lib directory after build-image.sh has unpacked the Druid distribution into /usr/local/druid.

The key benefit is that the dependencies are downloaded once and are served from the local repo afterwards.

Third-Party Servers

As described in the Docker section, we use third-party “official” images for three of our external server dependencies:

  • MySQL. This image is configured to create the Druid database and user upon startup.
  • ZooKeeper.
  • Kafka. There is no “official” image so we use the one from Bitnami.

See compose/dependencies.yaml for the Docker Compose configuration for each of these services.

Other integration tests use additional servers such as Hadoop. We will want to track down official images for those as well.

Guice and Lifecycle

Nothing will consume more of your time than fighting with Druid's Guice and Lifecycle mechanisms. These mechanisms are designed to do exactly one thing: configure the Druid server. They are a nightmare to use in other configurations such as unit or integration tests.

Guice Modules

Druid has many Guice modules. There is no documentation to explain which components are available from which modules, or their dependencies. So, if one needs component X, one has to hunt through the source to find the module that provides X. (Or, one has to “just know.”) There is no trick other than putting in the time to do the research, watching things fail, and trying harder.

In addition, modules have implicit dependencies: to use module Y you must also include module Z. Again, there is no documentation, you have to know or figure it out.

The modules are designed to work only in the server, so they assume the entire server is avaialble. Once we have a way that the modules work in the server, we don't mess with it. But, in tests, we want to use a subset because tests are clients, not a server. So, we end up fighting to reuse a system that was designed for exactly one use case: the server. The result is either a huge amount of time fiddling to get things right or (as in the original integration tests), we just include everything and pretend we are a server.

There is no obvious solution, it is just a massive time sink at present.

Druid Modules

Many of the modules we want to use in integration test are DruidModules. These go beyond the usual Guice modules to provide extra functionality, some of which is vital in tests:

  • The modules have depenencies injected from the “startup injector.”
  • The modules provide Jackson modules needed to serialized JSON.

The Initialization class provides the mechanisms needed to work with DruidModules, but only when creating a server: that same class has a strong opinion about which modules to include based on the assumption that the process is a server (or a Druid tool which acts like a server.)

The code here refactored Initialization a bit to allow us to use the functionality without being forced to accept all the default server modules. The upside is that we don't end up having to fake the tests to look like servers. The downside is the issue above: we have to deal with the dependency nightmare.

Lifecycle Race Conditions

Druid uses the Lifecycle class to manage object initialization. The Lifecycle expects instances to be registered before the lifecycle starts, after which it is impossible to register new instances.

The lifecycle works out startup order based on Guice injection dependencies. Thus, if a constructor is X(Y y, Z y) Guice knows to create an Y and Z before creating X. Lifecycle leverages this knowledge to start Y and Z before starting X.

This works only if, during module creation, something has a dependency on X. Else, if X is a LazySingleton it won‘t be created until it is first used. But, by then, the Lifecycle will have started and you’ll get the dreaded “It doesn't work that way” error.

Guice and Lifecycle in Tests

In the server, this works fine: there is exactly one usage of each singleton, and the various modules have appearently been tweaked to ensure every lifecycle-aware object is referenced (thus created, this registerd in the lifecycle) by some other module.

In tests, however, this system breaks down. Maven runs a series of tests (via failsafe), each of which has any number of test methods. The test driver is free to create any number of test class instances.

When using the Lifecycle mechanism in tests, we would prefer to set up the injector, and run the lifecycle, once per test class. This is easy to do with the JUnit @BeforeClass annotation. But, when we try this, the livecycle race condition issue slams us hard.

Tests want to reference certain components, such as DruidNodeDiscoveryProvider which require CuratorFramework which is provided by a module that registers a component with the lifecycle. Because of the lazy singleton pattern, DruidNodeDiscoveryProvider (and hence its dependenencies) are created when first referenced, which occurs when JUnit instantiates the test class, which happens after the Guice/Lifecycle setup in @BeforeClass. And, we get our “It doesn't work that way” error.

We can then try to move Guice/Lifecycle creation into the test class constuctor, but then we‘ll watch as JUnit creates multiple instances and we end up running initialization over and over. Further, it seems there are race conditions when we do that (haven’t figure out the details), and we get strange errors. Further, we end up thrashing the very complex initializaiton logic (which is a great stress test, but we need to it only once, not on every test.)

A hacky compromise is to add a caching layer: do the initialization in the constructor, so we can inject the member variables, which creates references, which causes the comonents to be created, which causes them to register with the Lifecycle at the proper time. In the second constructor call, we reuse the injector created in the first call. Since we simply reuse the same singletons, we should not run into Livecycle race conditions. The @AfterClass JUnit annotation is pressed into service to shut down the lifecycle after all tests run.

Testing Tools And the Custom Node Role

The Druid extension druid-testing-tools (Maven project extensions-core/testing-tools provides an extension to be loaded into the Druid image along with the Druid distribution and third-party libraries.

The integration-tests provides additional components (such as the custom node role) that must be placed in the image, but uses an entirely different mechanism.

There is no documentation to explain why we do testing-tools one way, the custom node role a different way. Is there a reason other than the items were created by different people at different times who chose to use different approaches?

In an ideal world, testing-tools would contain the custom node role: there would be a single way to provide test-only extensions. However, since we must maintain backward compatibility with integration-tests, and that module is a nightmare to modify, we must use a short-term compromise.

For now, we punt: we make a copy of druid-testing-tools, add the integraton-tools custom node role, and call it testing-tools-ex. See testing-tools/README for the details.

Integration Tests and base-test

The integration-tests project contains the set of existing TestNG-based tests as well as a large number of utilities used by the tests. The revised framework adds its own utilities.

The utilities speicfic to the new tests resides in the base-test sub-project. We include the integration-test project to reusse its utilities.

This does create a potential conflict: as we convert tests, the tests here will have the same name as tests in the integration-test package, which causes duplicate class names on the class path: never a good thing.

The ideal solution would be to move the test utilities to a new sub-project within integration-tests and have both the new and old test projects include the resulting jar.

For now, we use a “shadow” approach, we use the org.apache.druid.testsEx package name for new tests so names do not conflict with the org.apache.druid.tests name used in integration-tests. Eventually, if all tests are renamed, we can rename the testsEx package back to tests.

In a few cases, the utilitiy classes make asumptions about the test setup which does not match the new setup. In this case, we make a copy of the class and apply needed changes. At present, only one class has this issue:

  • DruidClusterAdminClient - interfaces with Docker using hard-coded container names.

The old versions are in org.apache.druid.testing.utils in integration-tests, the new versions in org.apache.druid.testing2.utils in this project.