This is a set of integration tests to be run against a live cluster.

To run Tempest, you first need to create a configuration file that will tell Tempest where to find the various OpenStack services and other testing behavior switches.

The easiest way to create a configuration file is to copy the sample one in the etc/ directory

$> cd $TEMPEST_ROOT_DIR
$> cp etc/tempest.conf.sample etc/tempest.conf

After that, open up the etc/tempest.conf file and edit the configuration variables to match valid data in your environment. This includes your Keystone endpoint, a valid user and credentials, and reference data to be used in testing.

Tempest is not tied to any single test runner, but Nose been the most commonly used tool. After setting up your configuration file, you can execute the set of Tempest tests by using nosetests

$> nosetests tempest

At present, there are three sections to be configured: nova, environment, and image. The nova section includes information about your Keystone endpoint, as well as valid credentials for a user. It also contains logical timeouts for certain actions. The environment section contains reference data to be used when testing the Compute portion of OpenStack, as well as feature flags for tests that may or may not work based on your hypervisor or current environment. Lastly, the image section contains credentials and endpoints for the Glance image service.

Tempest was originally designed to primarily run against a full OpenStack deployment. Due to that focus, some issues may occur when running Tempest against devstack.

Running Tempest, especially in parallel, against a devstack instance may cause requests to be rate limited, which will cause unexpected failures. Given the number of requests Tempest can make against a cluster, rate limiting should be disabled for all test accounts.

Additionally, devstack only provides a single image which Nova can use. For the moment, the best solution is to provide the same image uuid for both image_ref and image_ref_alt. Tempest will skip tests as needed if it detects that both images are the same.