Day 40 - Test::Nginx new features

I told you about my frustration with Test::Nginx in previous posts (Day 33 and Day 32) and managed to discuss them with agentzh (the module maintainer/author).

Here are the evolutions I offered to contribute:

1. Be able to have multiple requests in each test. As a replacement for this, I had to use pipelined_requests and matching on the response.
2. Better control over the stop/start sequence. The idea here is to restart the nginx server only when the config changes between two tests. With a TEST_NGINX_FORCE_RESTART_ON_TEST variable to preserve the current behavior.
3. Improve the documentation of the possible test sections.

And I started working on the second one because first one is likely to have a HUGE impact on the code base and I'm scared to break everything. From what I can tell, all the modules developed by agentzh and his friends at Taobao/Alibaba extensively rely on Test::Nginx for testing. This includes the famous Echo module (very useful for debugging configurations) and heavy-lifting modules like the LUA module (embeds a LUA scripting engine in nginx) or the Drizzle module (non-blocking access to you MySQL DB, a must have if you want to scale like nobody else). And I wouldn't want to break their work.

So, I started easy with just adding the following:

1. Support for environment variable TEST_NGINX_NO_NGINX_MANAGER (defaults to 0) which disables the nginx management code (stop/config/start). Very useful when you want to run tests on an already running NGINX (set TEST_NGINX_NO_NGINX_MANAGER to 1 and TEST_NGINX_CLIENT_PORT to the port your running nginx is listening on). Of course, this could be abused in every conceivable way (for example to test another web server ;)). As far as I'm concerned, the main purpose of this was to be able to run my tests on a nginx that I had started with debug on plus a few breakpoints).
2. Support for environment variable TEST_NGINX_FORCE_RESTART_ON_TEST (defaults to 1). If you don't provide any config section in your test (or if it does not change between two successive tests), the nginx server will not be restarted (if TEST_NGINX_FORCE_RESTART_ON_TEST is explicitely set to 0, of course). This way, using TEST_NGINX_FORCE_RESTART_ON_TEST=1 with TEST_NGINX_NO_SHUFFLE=1 and having a config section only on the first test, you can have all tests use the same configuration. I find this very useful to avoid one of the annoying features of Test::Nginx, namely that it removes all logs between two runs. Hopefully, at some point in the future, I'll convince agentzh to have shuffling and force restart turned off by default.

While I was working on this, I realised the code doing the stop/config/start could use some refactoring/rewriting. So, I think this is one more thing to add to my TODO list regarding Test::Nginx.

For those of you who are interested, my commits are on the devel branch of Test::Nginx. Feedback and testing quite welcome (as usual with FOSS)...