Testing Against a Remote Docker Host with AL Test Runner

Apologies for another post about AL Test Runner. If you don’t use or care about the extension you can probably stop reading now and come back next time. It isn’t my intention to keep banging on about it – but the latest version (v0.2.1) does plug a significant gap.

Next time I’ll move onto a different subject – some thoughts about how we use Git to manage our code effectively.

Developing Against a Remote Docker Container

While I still prefer developing against a local Docker container I know that many others publish their apps to a container hosted somewhere else. In which case your options for running tests against that container are:

• Using the Remote Development capability of VS Code to open a terminal and execute PowerShell on the remote host – discussed here and favoured by Tobias Fenster (although his views on The Beautiful Game may make you suspicious of any of his opinions 😉)
• Enabling PS-Remoting and opening a PowerShell session to the host to execute some commands over the network – today’s topic

Again, shout out to Max and colleagues for opening a pull request with their changes to enable this and for testing these latest mods.

Enable PS Remoting

Firstly, you’re going to need to be able to open a PowerShell session to the Docker host with:

New-PSSession <computer name>

I won’t pretend to understand the intricacies of setting this up in different scenarios – you should probably read the blog of someone who knows what they are talking about if you need help with it.

The solution will likely include:

• Opening a PowerShell session on the host as administrator and running Enable-PSRemoting
• Making sure the firewall is open to the port that you are connecting over
• Passing a credential and possibly an authentication type to New-PSSession

To connect to my test server in Azure I run the following:

New-PSSession <server name> -Credential (Get-Credential) -Authentication Basic

AL Test Runner Config

They are several new keys in the AL Test Runner config file to accommodate remote containers. There are also a few new commands to help create the required config.

The Open Config File command will open the config JSON file or create it, if it doesn’t already exist. Set Container Credential and Set VM Credential can be used to set the credentials used to connect to the container and the remote host respectively.

The required config keys are:

• dockerHost – the name of the server that is hosting the Docker containers. This name will be used to create the remote PowerShell session. Leaving this blank implies that containers are hosted locally and the extension will work as before
• vmUserName / vmSecurePassword – the credentials used to connect to the Docker host
• remoteContainerName – the name of the container to run tests against
• newPSSessionOptions – switches and parameters that should be added to New-PSSession to open the session to the Docker host (see below)

The extension uses New-PSSession to open the PowerShell session to the Docker host. The ComputerName and Credential parameters will populated from the dockerHost and vmUserName / vmSecurePassword config values respectively.

Any additional parameters that must be specified should be added to the newPSSessionOptions config key. As in my case I run

New-PSSession <server name> -Credential <credential> -Authentication Basic

I need to set newPSSessionOptions in the config file to “-Authentication Basic”. You can use this key for -useSSL, -Port, -SessionOption or whatever else you need to open the session.

With the config complete you should be able to execute tests, output the results and decorate the test codeunits as if you were working locally. Beautiful.

As ever, feedback, suggestions and contributions welcome. Hosted on GitHub.