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Peter Benjamin (they/them)
Peter Benjamin (they/them)

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Unit Test Your Configuration Files

pile of paper garbage
Infrastructure as Code. Photo courtesy: @Bass Emmen

Originally published at https://pbnj.dev

Table of Contents

Overview

The era of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) has unlocked tremendous developer
productivity and agility features. Now, as an Engineer, we can declare our
infrastructure and environments as structured data in configuration files, such
as Terraform templates, Dockerfiles, and Kubernetes manifests.

However, this agility and speed of provisioning and configuring infrastructure
comes with a high risk of bugs in the form of misconfigurations.

Fortunately, we can solve this problem just as we can solve for other bugs in
our products, by writing unit tests.

One such tool that can help us unit test our configuration files is
conftest. What is unique about
conftest is that it uses
Open-Policy-Agent (OPA) and a policy
language, called
Rego to
accomplish this.

This might appear difficult at first, but it will start to make sense.

Let's explore 2 use-cases where we can test our configurations!

Getting Started

First, some prerequisites:

  • conftest:
    • macOS: brew install instrumenta/instrumenta/conftest
  • (Optional) opa:
    • macOS: brew install opa

Dockerfile

Let's say we want to prevent some images and/or tags (e.g. latest).

We need to create a simple Dockerfile:

FROM kalilinux/kali-linux-docker:latest

ENTRYPOINT ["echo"]
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Now, we need to create our first unit test file, let's call it test.rego, and
place it in a directory, let's call it policy (this is configurable).

package main

disallowed_tags := ["latest"]
disallowed_images := ["kalilinux/kali-linux-docker"]

deny[msg] {
        input[i].Cmd == "from"
        val := input[i].Value
        tag := split(val[i], ":")[1]
        contains(tag, disallowed_tags[_])

        msg = sprintf("[%s] tag is not allowed", [tag])
}

deny[msg] {
        input[i].Cmd == "from"
        val := input[i].Value
        image := split(val[i], ":")[0]
        contains(image, disallowed_images[_])

        msg = sprintf("[%s] image is not allowed", [image])
}
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Assuming we are in the right directory, we can test our Dockerfile:

$ ls
Dockerfile      policy/

$ conftest test -i Dockerfile ./Dockerfile
FAIL - ./Dockerfile - [latest] tag is not allowed
FAIL - ./Dockerfile - [kalilinux/kali-linux-docker] image is not allowed
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Just to be sure, let's change this Dockerfile to pass the test:

# FROM kalilinux/kali-linux-docker:latest
FROM debian:buster

ENTRYPOINT ["echo"]
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$ ls
Dockerfile      policy/

$ conftest test -i Dockerfile ./Dockerfile
PASS - ./Dockerfile - data.main.deny
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"It works! But I don't understand how," I hear you thinking to yourself.

Let's break the Rego syntax down:

  • package main is a way for us to put some rules that belong together in a namespace. In this case, we named it main because conftest defaults to it, but we can easily do something like package docker and then run conftest test -i Dockerfile --namespace docker ./Dockerfile
  • disallowed_tags & disallowed_images are just simple variables that hold an array of strings
  • deny[msg] { ... } is the start of the deny rule and it means that the Dockerfile should be rejected and the user should be given an error message msg if the conditions in the body (i.e. { ... }) are true
  • Expressions in the body of the deny rule are treated as logical AND. For example:
  1 == 1                    # IF 1 is equal to 1
  contains("foobar", "foo") # AND "foobar" contains "foo"
                            # This would trigger the deny rule
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  • input[i].Cmd == "from" checks if the Docker command is FROM. input[i] means we can have multiple Dockerfiles being tested at once. This will iterate over them
  • The next 2 lines are assignments just to split a string and store some data in variables
  • contains(tag, disallowed_tags[_]) will return true if the tag we obtained from the Dockerfile contains one of the disallowed_tags. array[_] syntax means iterate over values
  • msg := sprinf(...) creates the message we want to tell our user if this deny rule is triggered
  • The second deny[msg] rule checks that the image itself is not on the blocklist.

Kubernetes

Let's say we want to ensure that all pods are running as a non-root user.

We need to create our deployment

$ mkdir -p kubernetes
$ cat <<EOF >./kubernetes/deployment.yaml
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nginx-deployment
  labels:
    app: nginx
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: nginx
          image: nginx:1.7.9
          ports:
            - containerPort: 80
EOF
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Now, we need to create our unit test:

$ mkdir -p ./kubernetes/policy
$ cat <<EOF >./kubernetes/policy/test.rego
package main

name := input.metadata.name

deny[msg] {
  input.kind == "Deployment"
  not input.spec.template.spec.securityContext.runAsNonRoot

  msg = sprintf("Containers must run as non root in Deployment %s. See: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/security-context/", [name])
}
EOF
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And, let's run it:

conftest test -i yaml ./kubernetes/deployment.yaml
FAIL - ./kubernetes/deployment.yaml - Containers must run as non root in Deployment nginx-deployment. See: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/security-context/
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This is a bit more straightforward:

  • Get the metadata.name from the input (which is the Kubernetes Deployment yaml file)
  • Create a deny rule that is triggered if:
    • input.kind is Deployment and
    • securityContext.runAsNonRoot is not set
  • Return an error message to the user that containers must run as non-root and point them to the docs.

Next Steps

So, where to go from here?

The Rego language is vast and it can take a bit to wrap your head around how it
works. You can even send and receive HTTP requests inside Rego.

I recommend reading the docs to learn more about Rego's capabilities:

I also barely scratched the surface with conftest in this blog post. The
repository has a nice list of
examples that you should
peruse at your leisure. conftest even supports sharing policies via uploading
OPA bundles to OCI-compliant registries, e.g. conftest push ...,
conftest pull ....

Lastly, if you have any questions, the OPA community is friendly and welcoming.
Feel free to join the #conftest channel in
OPA Slack.

Happy coding!

Top comments (5)

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phlash profile image
Phil Ashby

I applaud the sentiment of unit testing configuration however it concerns me that a test can appear more complex than the configuration under test :)

Are there other tools and techniques that can be used effectively to test a deployment config?

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pbnj profile image
Peter Benjamin (they/them) • Edited

Hi Phil,

That's a great question.

I don't know of many tools or testing frameworks that are general enough to be applied to any structured data. One such tool that falls under this category is terratest, which requires you to write your tests in Go (I haven't had a chance to explore it).

On the other hand, there are a number of specialized testing frameworks/tools for specific types of configuration files, like:

  • chefspec for Chef recipes
  • serverspec for ensuring servers conform to a baseline
  • goss which is like serverspec but in YAML
  • this for Ansible
  • tfsec for terraform

So, it depends on your use-case.

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phlash profile image
Phil Ashby

Cool, thanks Peter, I have reading to do!

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ievansanz profile image
Ian Evans

Great article Peter, thank you!
I've been looking for further information (and bending my mind to OPA) on what you explained for...
input[i].Cmd == "from"
... I understand input is an OPA reserved construct but how did you come to understand .Cmd in relation to Dockerfiles (or is it more OPA generic)? I've seen several docker examples that all leverage input[i].Cmd == but always assumed this was some Conftest special-sauce as an iterator for the commands within a Dockerfile.
Have you found a Conftest or OPA explaination that explains this?
Thanks again,
Ian

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ievansanz profile image
Ian Evans

Aha, found that conftest parser for Dockerfile implements the .Cmd... case closed!