Automated Testing

Overview

FluentFTP has an extensive automated test suite that includes unit tests for modules, and integration tests which test FluentFTP against many supported FTP servers using Docker containers to locally mount and configure these servers portably.

All credits for the development of our excellent integration test system go to Tommy Sørbråten, Michael Stiemke and Robin Rodricks.

Projects

• FluentFTP.Tests - XUnit test suite that performs:

  • Unit testing - Tests FluentFTP components and algorithms in isolation.
  • Integration testing - Tests all major FTP functionality against containerized FTP servers.

• FluentFTP.Dockers - Dockerfiles for our customized FTP servers used by the test suite.

• FluentFTP.Xunit - Containerized FTP server management used by the test suite.

Supported Servers

We have an extensive automated test suite that tests FluentFTP against these servers. We use docker to locally manage containerized FTP servers that are used for testing.

The supported servers are listed below.

Note: You don't need to download these projects manually, everything you need is in the FluentFTP repo.

Server	Type	Credits
VsFTPd	First-party	Created by the FluentFTP team in this PR.
Bftpd	First-party	Created by the FluentFTP team in this PR.
ProFTPD	First-party	Created by the FluentFTP team in this PR.
glFTPd	First-party	Created by the FluentFTP team in this PR.
FileZilla	First-party	Created by the FluentFTP team in this PR.
PureFTPd	First-party	Created by the FluentFTP team in this PR.
Apache FTP	First-party	Created by the FluentFTP team in this PR.
PyFtpdLib	Third-party	Created by Andrii Kohut.

You can help! Please file an issue if you can develop or find docker images for more FTP servers!

How do I run the test suite?

Prerequisites

1. Windows 10+ Home/Pro/Enterprise/Education 64-bit (or any OS supporting Docker)
2. Virtualization in your BIOS must be enabled
3. Hyper-V and Containers must be enabled (Windows only)
4. Visual Studio 2022+ or VS Code
5. Docker Desktop

Steps

1. Open Docker Desktop to make sure it is running properly on your system.
2. Run the Build.bat or Build.sh script inside the FluentFTP.Dockers folder to create the docker images. See below for tips.
3. Run all the tests inside the FluentFTP.Tests project. It will automatically start and stop the docker FTP servers as required.

How does the integration test system work?

How it works:

1. We support a variety of FTP servers which are docker images created and published by third parties
2. Each FTP server has a container class that manages it
3. All container classes inherit from DockerFtpContainer
4. DockerFtpContainer has a Build method responsible for building a test container (TestcontainersContainer)
5. The Build method creates the image using the configured DockerImage and sets the default port binding for port 21
6. Each type of container can then add additional options in their Configure method
7. We then use the test container data to start a docker container using the Testcontainers library
8. After running the tests we run a system command to shut down the docker container

How do I reduce the space used by Docker on my development machine?

Rationale

Docker on Windows takes up a lot of space due to this issue. WSL2 virtual disks are "dynamic" .vhdx images, which means they:

• Are allocated to a maximum size
• Are initialized with just a few kilobytes of structural data
• Grow dynamically as data is added, up to their maximum allocated size

See this stackoverflow answer for more details.

Purge data

If you're willing to wipe all of your docker data, open the Docker Desktop client, click the bug icon in the top bar, and then click Clean/Purge data.

Purge commands

Consider using docker builder prune --all -f and docker image prune -f commands. Although Docker tries to handle caching of build steps correctly, there are many cases where you would fare better when "starting from scratch". It is not so easy to convince Docker to forgo its cached layers, so use these commands when needed.

Disk usage extension

If you are using Docker Desktop, you can add the Disk Usage extension to clean up unused disk space.

What are the design philosophies behind the containerized servers?

Our First-party images are all based on debian:bullseye-slim for consistancy and common behaviour and the Dockerfiles run bash, have a common structure and lend themselves to modifications.

The builds for our First-party images contain a preliminary step that tries to identify the closest, most up to date and hi-bandwidth mirror for debian bullseye and sets that in the etc/apt/source.list of the building step. If you have problems, disable that behaviour in the Dockerfiles and use the standard "http://deb.debian.org/debian" url for debian bullseye.

How do I improve docker image build time?

The docker build batch file will build all the available images:

• First-party containers have been optimised to build as fast as possible
• Third-party containers might take a while to build, especially when loading/installing from distro/repos that are far away.

Typically, these images will be built once, only the developers of such an image will value a speedy build process when they do many iterations. Be prepared for a very long running build process depending on the bandwidth of the source repo mirrors.

You might want to use "REM" to comment out images that you do not want to use or that you already have built. You might want to "totally rebuild" from scratch in some cases and you might want to see more explicit progress reports when building test images. Look up the possible options for docker build and the possible commands to prune or delete existing caches or images.