Getting Started

LabTest has three different parts: the laboratory, the project configuration and the client that runs on your machine.

What do you need to do?

• I just need to get it working on my machine

• I need to get my project ready

• I need a laboratory

Setting up your local machine

This is a one-time process. It installs the Lab Test package and configures your machine to easily talk to the test server.

There are two things you need to do: install the LabTest client and get access to the Laboratory server.

Install labtest

First we install the Lab Test command line package:

$ pip install labtest

At this point you should be able to run the command labtest:

Testing your LabTest client install

$ labtest
Usage: labtest [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Console script for labtest

Options:
  -c, --config PATH  Alternate configuration file.
  -v, --verbose      Show verbose output.
  --help             Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  check-config  Check the configuration and output any errors
  create        Create a test instance on the server
  delete        Delete a test instance on the server
  encrypt       Encrypt a secret
  list          Delete a test instance on the server
  update        Delete a test instance on the server
  version       Display the current labtest client version

If you get Command not found on Mac OS X or Linux, you might need to edit the ~/.bashrc file in your home folder and add the following at the bottom of the file:

~/.bashrc addition

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

For Windows, it depends on the version. This article from Computer Hope can help. You will need to append %APPDATA%Python/bin to your Path variable.

Accessing the Laboratory

Note

Gaining access to your Laboratory depends on how it is set up. Contact your administrator for the specific instructions.

This will walk you through an example setup using the default laboratory Cloud Formation configuration for AWS.

You will need your public SSH key. This is used for authenticating.

AWS account user

You need a user configured in AWS IAM. No specific permissions are required for each user by LabTest. It uses IAM and the SSH key for authentication.

To get your public SSH configured with IAM, follow the instructions.

Configure SSH

To set up your SSH configuration. We need a few bits of information:

• SSH bastion DNS name or IP address

• The test server IP address (it is a non-routable IP address, like 10.x.x.x)

• Your user name.

If your username contains +, =, ,, or @ you need to convert a few characters:

• + to .plus.

• = to .equal.

• , to .comma.

• @ to .at.

For this example:

• SSH bastion public IP address: 111.222.111.222

• Test server private IP address: 10.20.3.3

• User name: corey.oordt.at.boston.gov (converted from corey.oordt@boston.gov)

Now we add some lines to our ~/.ssh/config file:

The addition to the ~/.ssh/config file.

Host bastion
Hostname 111.222.111.222
Port 22
User corey.oordt.at.boston.gov
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Host test
Hostname 10.20.3.3
User corey.oordt.at.boston.gov
Port 22
ProxyCommand ssh -A -T bastion nc %h %p
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Note

If the location of the private key is not at ~/.ssh/id_rsa then change the IdentityFile path in both places.

With that in place, you should be able to ssh to the test server:

SSH’ing to the test server

$ ssh test
Last login: Sun May  6 15:18:17 2018 from ip-10-20-2-2.ec2.internal

       __|  __|_  )
       _|  (     /   Amazon Linux 2 AMI
      ___|\___|___|

https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-2/
No packages needed for security; 56 packages available
Run "sudo yum update" to apply all updates.
[corey.oordt.at.boston.gov@ip-10-20-3-3 ~]$

You can disconnect by typing control-d or exit.