Container Inspection

Historic Research

Several more test options exist in addition to those presented in Listing 1. For example, you can check the access rights of a file and the user and group IDs with Uid and Gid. The official documentation on GitHub [1] explains the currently available test set but only provided a brief reference when this issue went to press.

For your first steps, Google offers the gcr.io/google-appengine/python Docker image, which essentially contains a Python interpreter. Matching tests can be found in a separate GitHub repository [3].

Parameters of the container-structure-test command-line tool have changed slightly in the past. Many examples online still refer to an older version. Even the official documentation on GitHub contains some broken sample commands.

Compared with older versions, you need to introduce the parameters with two hyphens and replace -test.v with the shorter test. Furthermore, the YAML file must be loaded explicitly with the --config parameter. In many obsolete examples, container-structure-test is also referred to as structure-test. The sample call that you frequently come across,

structure-test -test.v -image gcr.io/google-appengine/python python_command_tests.yaml

thus needs to be converted to the following for the current 1.4.0 version:

container-structure-test test --image gcr.io/google-appengine/python --config python_command_tests.yaml

In case of doubt, you can call

container-structure-test help

to reveal the valid parameters.

Conclusions

CST lets developers and admins validate containers extremely quickly. In most cases, you do not even need to start the containers. Thanks to the short YAML (or JSON) notation, the tests are quick and easy to enter, without a long learning curve.

However, the simple structure of the test descriptions does tend to limit your options. To find out whether version 5.7 or newer of MySQL is installed involves some contortions. Furthermore, CST is designed to test containers and images before they are used and not during operation. If you need to carry out extensive tests on live containers, you might want take a look at another product, such as Testinfra [4].