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OPA Gatekeeper Testing📜

OPA Gatekeeper Testing is an important aspect of ensuring that the policies established will be enforced. These test policies are written in the native language Rego. Policy testing enables you to verify the accuracy of policies and provides a framework to assists in writing test policies. Policy testing speeds up the development process of the new rules and reduces rule modification time.

OPA Gatekeeper evaluates policies against all pod request in any namespace unless specified. Tests are expressed as standard Rego rules with a naming convention that prefixes the rule name with test_. By default, opa test runs all subcommands, reports the number of tests executed, and displays all failed tests or errors. It also includes a dryrun functionality which enables testing a Constraint on a live cluster without enforcing it. This functionality allows testing the Constraint without negatively impacting the cluster operations.

Best Practices and Considerations📜

Best practices to consider when writing test coverages are:

  • What Kubernetes API resource fields does my policy query?
  • Are any of them optional?
  • Can they appear more than once in a spec?
  • How many positive test cases need to be written to ensure the policy will do as expected?
  • How many negative test cases need to be written to ensure the policy will not produce undesired results?

Click here for information on Testing.

Current Test Environment📜

Although the above test framework is ideal for testing policies, the current testing in this repo takes a more simplistic approach. During the CI pipeline, bad resources are deployed to test violations. Each Constraint deployed is checked for a violation. If a violations is NOT found, the test fails. In addition, good resources are deployed to verify violations do not occur on these resources.


Last update: 2021-06-18 by Michael McLeroy