Running Pester Tests in Parallel

I’m working on a project which uses pester tests to validate our deployment and system health.

We’ve accumulated a lot of tests. Nearly all of these sit and wait on things to happen in the deployment and we’re running them sequentially which takes around 20mins. Each of our tests is in it’s own file.

What I wanted to do was, as these are IO bound tests waiting on things to trip in the environment or polling http endpoints, run them all in parallel. One file per thead or something similar.

This issue discusses this topic. I took a lead from the Invoke-Parallel snipped and started playing, unfortunately the output from the tests was mangled and overlapping.

Then I realised I could use Powershell Jobs to schedule the work and poll for the job to be completed then receive each jobs to have to output displayed nicely.

So now the output looks good:

Note: We’re using Pester v4 you’ll have to do a little bit of fiddling to port to Pester 5

	Install-Module –Name Pester –RequiredVersion 4.6.0 –force

	$testFilePath = "./tests"
	# Start a jobs running each of the test files
	$testFiles = Get-ChildItem $testFilePath
	$resultFileNumber = 0
	foreach ($testFile in $testFiles)
	{
	$resultFileNumber++
	$testName = Split-Path $testFile –leaf

	# Create the job, be sure to pass argument in from the ArgumentList which
	# are needed for inside the script block, they are NOT automatically passed.
	Start-Job `
	–ArgumentList $testFile, $resultFileNumber `
	–Name $testName `
	–ScriptBlock {
	param($testFile, $resultFileNumber)

	# Start trace for local debugging if TEST_LOG=true
	# the traces will show you output in the ./testlogs folder and the files
	# are updated as the tests run so you can follow along
	if ($env:TEST_LOGS -eq "true") {
	Start-Transcript –Path "./testlogs/$(Split-Path $testFile –leaf).integrationtest.log"
	}

	# Run the test file
	Write-Host "$testFile to result file #$resultFileNumber"
	$result = Invoke-Pester "$testFile"

	if ($result.FailedCount -gt 0) {
	throw "1 or more assertions failed"
	}
	}
	}

	# Poll to give insight into which jobs are still running so you can spot long running ones
	do {
	Write-Host ">> Still running tests @ $(Get-Date –Format "HH:mm:ss")" –ForegroundColor Blue
	Get-Job \| Where-Object { $_.State -eq "Running" } \| Format-Table –AutoSize
	Start-Sleep –Seconds 15
	} while ((get-job \| Where-Object { $_.State -eq "Running" } \| Measure-Object).Count -gt 1)

	# Catch edge cases by wait for all of them to finish
	Get-Job \| Wait-Job

	$failedJobs = Get-Job \| Where-Object { -not ($_.State -eq "Completed")}

	# Receive the results of all the jobs, don't stop at errors
	Get-Job \| Receive-Job –AutoRemoveJob –Wait –ErrorAction 'Continue'

	if ($failedJobs.Count -gt 0) {
	Write-Host "Failed Jobs" –ForegroundColor Red
	$failedJobs
	throw "One or more tests failed"
	}

view raw run.ps1 hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Here is the full repro: https://github.com/lawrencegripper/hack-parallelpester

GripDev

Code, Apps and Thoughts @lawrencegripper

Running Pester Tests in Parallel

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