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Variable Sets

A common use case for tests is to assert the same behavior across multiple environments (dev, staging, and production, for example). To make sure all of these environments will have the same behavior, it is important that the tests executed against those environments test the same aspects. To reduce the risks of diverging tests, Tracetest allows you to organize different environments configurations using global objects called Variable Sets.

How Variable Sets Work​

Variable sets are objects containing variables that can be referenced by tests. You can use a single test and provide the information on which environment object will be used to run the test. To illustrate this, consider an app that is deployed in three stages: dev, staging, and production. We can execute the same test in all those environments, however, both URL and credentials change from environment to environment. To run the same test against the three deployments of the app, you can create three variable sets:

# dev.env
type: VariableSet
spec:
  name: dev.env
  id: dev.env
  values:
    - key: URL
      value: https://app-dev.com
    - key: API_TOKEN
      value: dev-key
# staging.env
type: VariableSet
spec:
  name: staging.env
  id: staging.env
  values:
    - key: URL
      value: https://app-staging.com
    - key: API_TOKEN
      value: staging-key
# production.env
type: VariableSet
spec:
  name: production.env
  id: production.env
  values:
    - key: URL
      value: https://app-prod.com
    - key: API_TOKEN
      value: prod-key

Now consider the following test:

type: Test
specs:
  name: Test user creation
  trigger:
    type: http
    httpRequest:
        url: "${var:URL}/api/users"
        method: POST
        body: '{}'
        authentication:
          type: bearer
          bearer:
            token: "${var:API_TOKEN}"

Both var:URL and var:API_TOKEN would be replaced by the variables defined in the chosen variable set where the test will run. So, if the chosen variable set was dev.env, its values would be replaced by https://app-dev.com and dev-key, respectively.