Ok, you develop a Kodi add-on and you would like to have CI for your code. What options do you have? How Kodi add-ons can be tested? And how to configure a CI for a Kodi add-on code? Let me share my experience.

During add-on development I use Kodi installed on my operating system for testing. But what if I need to test my changes on various Kodi versions? It's not so easy to install different versions of a package on such distros as Ubuntu. We could try some Kodi container image but I decided to build my own.

When I started working at Red Hat my first job was contribution to integration tests of one web application. The tests are written Python and the repository has both setup.py and requirements.txt. But why?

Applications provisioned in OpenShift can use its OAuth authentication mechanism for granting access. This is very useful feature because all applications running on OpenShift will have consistent behavior. But there might be some caveats if you don't understand fully how OAuth works.

Last two years I've been working on various parts of cloud.redhat.com. It's a big web application with bunch of services and all of them provide REST API. In order to standardize documentation OpenAPI was chosen as a specification for describing REST API. It's a nice thing and I really see the value in it but the more your service is getting bigger the more complicated become editing of the specification. I found a helpful tool that might interest you.

When I started to work at Red Hat I familiarized with Red Hat Certification program. You can take an exam related to some Red Hat product and if you pass you will get a certificate. Red Hat exams differ form other certification programs in the industry. You get a system, e.g. RHEL, and you need to configure and fix it according to the tasks in the exam. Besides it has some milestones that give you motivation to take more exams.

You might know Why I don't like Jenkins but I still have to use it in my job. Recently I was need to migrate Jenkins jobs to new instance and it was easier than I expected.

When I was starting to familiarize with OpenShift 3 I loved its builtin continous delivery mechanism. Using webhooks and triggers you can easily deploy your code from Github, GitLab or Bitbucket. In OpenShift 4 more Kubernetes resources have been added and they don't have triggers support. Is there a way to enable it?

I guess all of you who have worked on UI testing know the "locator" problem. In order to find an element in the DOM you need to provide a locator and usually it's an XPath string. Sometimes that xpath can be quite nontrivial and in one day developers change the code and your locator cannot find the required element. In order to avoid such situations as much as possible my colleagues Peter Savage, Ronny Pfannschmidt and Karel Hala have developed a specification for frontend developers Open Web UI Design Specification for Enabling Automation (OUIA). If your application complies with OUIA it will have predictable locators and the behavior. This significantly simplifies writing automated tests.

In this post I'll explain how to create your own Kodi add-on repository, deploy it on Netlify and automate that workflow.