Automating sanity testing for flux-core

[wspear]

I'm working on the e4s testsuite which runs quick sanity-checks on spack-installed packages provided by e4s (https://e4s-project.github.io/). flux-core is one of those packages. Is there a good way to run a totally scripted test of a pre-installed flux-core?

If I were testing manually I would do flux start, run a couple flux commands, maybe launch a trivial mpi application and exit but since flux start enters a new console session I can't find a way to script what happens after that. Redirecting commands to flux start via stdin doesn't seem to work.

Flux can not be running in the test environment prior to executing the test script. Any ideas how I can proceed here? Thanks!

[grondo]

If you run flux start COMMAND then the Flux test session will run COMMAND and exit with the exit status of the command.
So you could use a script for COMMAND and run a few sanity commands, exiting with error on failure.

It might be useful to run an instance with >1 broker, e.g. flux start --test-size=2 SCRIPT and in the script ensure a 2 node "job" works.

[wspear]

Yep, that does the trick. I'd assumed the 'command' argument was for something flux specific, not just anything I want to throw at it. Thanks!