Certmaster lessons learned
Posted on Fri 18 December 2015 in lessons
I'm started occassional series about lessons I've learned after finishing with a project. The kick-off article is about a certmaster fork I've been working on. I've been using certmaster at $work for a few years now, but when we wanted to start using multiple certificate authorities, we had to spin up different instances of certmaster, with each instance using on its own IP/port. It would be better if a single instance of certmaster could serve multiple CA's by adding a '--ca' flag. This is the functionality that my fork of certmaster provides, and here are the lessons I learned while working on this:
bats versus shunit2
certmaster doesn't include any tests, so I wanted to write some functional tests to verify my changes worked as expected.
I started out working with bats_, but it fell down when I needed to push a command into the background - it just wouldn't do it. I tried the 'gotcha' suggestions from this engine yard post but to no avail. I switched the tests to shunit2 and had no trouble pushing commands into the background.
Assigning here documents to variables
variable=$(cat <<EOF
this text will get assigned to variable.
EOF