Today I finally sat down and really worked on some powershell code. My end goal is to write some code that performs a series of smoke tests on an integration environment. I was hoping to use a unit testing framework that's already out there but I didn't quite like it. I wanted auto registration and execution of all my tests using some simple conventions. Here's what I spiked out:

As of right now, I have 2 files. One is the Test-Runner and it looks like this:

# Fixtures is currently a hard coded path
Get-ChildItem .\Fixtures | % { . Fixtures\$_ }

ls function:test-* |% { Write-Host -fore DarkCyan $_.Name; iex $_}

The first line dot sources all the files in the Fixtures sub-directory. These are the scripts that will contain tests (which I'll show later). The next line gets all the functions that start with 'Test-', writes the name to the console, then executes the function. So I have 2 conventions in place so far. All test functions must have the 'Test-' prefixed to the function name, and all tests must live in the Fixtures sub-directory.

Now I can write some very simple tests like the following:

function Get-Url($url) {
    Trap { Write-Host -ForegroundColor red Could not access webserver: $_.Exception.Message; Continue }
    
    $wc = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
    $wc.DownloadString($url)
}

function Assert-Url($url, $pattern) {
    Write-Host Making HTTP request to $url

    if (Get-Url $url -match $pattern) {
        Write-Host -ForegroundColor green Success
    } else {
        Write-Host -ForegroundColor red Failure: Response from $url does not match `'$pattern`'
    }
}


function Test-PassingTest() {
    $test_url = "http://scottmuc.com/blog/development/getting-my-build-and-release-on/"
    $expected_response_pattern  = 'Getting My Build and Release On'

    Assert-Url $test_url $expected_response_pattern
}

function Test-FailingTest() {
    $test_url = "http://scottmuc.com/doesnotexist"
    $expected_response_pattern  = 'not important'

    Assert-Url $test_url $expected_response_pattern
}

 Here you can see that I have two helper functions and two tests. The passing test asserts that a certain url contains a particular regular expression, and the failing test hits a non existent page. When executing the Test-Runner here's the output:

My next set of assertions will be to check for Windows Services running on remote servers. I can already see that it's going to be quite easy to setup those tests.