Pifpaf is a suite of fixtures and a command-line tool that allows to start and stop daemons for a quick throw-away usage. This is typically useful when needing these daemons to run integration testing. It originaly evolved from its precussor overtest.

Pifpaf currently supports:

• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• Memcached
• InfluxDB
• Etcd (with clustering)
• Redis (with sentinel mode)
• Elasticsearch
• ZooKeeper
• Gnocchi
• Aodh
• Ceph
• RabbitMQ (with clustering)
• FakeS3
• Consul
• Keystone
• CouchDB
• S3rver
• MongoDB
• OpenStack Swift
• Vault
• HttpBin

To use Pifpaf, simply call the pifpaf run $daemon <command> program that you need. It will setup the temporary environment and export a few environment variable for you to access it:

$ pifpaf run postgresql psql template1
Expanded display is used automatically.
Line style is unicode.
SET
psql (9.4.5)
Type "help" for help.

template1=# \l
                              List of databases
   Name    │ Owner │ Encoding │   Collate   │    Ctype    │ Access privileges
───────────┼───────┼──────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼───────────────────
 postgres  │ jd    │ UTF8     │ en_US.UTF-8 │ en_US.UTF-8 │
 template0 │ jd    │ UTF8     │ en_US.UTF-8 │ en_US.UTF-8 │ =c/jd            ↵
           │       │          │             │             │ jd=CTc/jd
 template1 │ jd    │ UTF8     │ en_US.UTF-8 │ en_US.UTF-8 │ =c/jd            ↵
           │       │          │             │             │ jd=CTc/jd
(3 rows)

template1=# \q
$

You can also run it with no command line provided:

$ eval `pifpaf run memcached`
$ env | grep PIFPAF
PIFPAF_PID=13387
PIFPAF_DAEMON=memcached
PIFPAF_URL=memcached://localhost:11212
PIFPAF_MEMCACHED_URL=memcached://localhost:11212
$ pifpaf_stop

Killing the daemon whose PID is contained in $PIFPAF_PID will stop the launched daemon and clean the test environment. You can kill it yourself or use the defined function pifpaf_stop.

Pifpaf exports a few environment variable:

• PIFPAF_DAEMON which contains the name of the daemon launched
• PIFPAF_URL which contains the URL to the daemon
• PIFPAF_PID the PID of the pifpaf daemon
• PIFPAF_$daemon_* variables, which contains daemon specific variables, such as port, database name, URL, etc.

Pifpaf provides the ability to change the prefix of its environment variable, allowing you to nest several Pifpaf instances and therefore running several daemons at once:

$ pifpaf --env-prefix STORAGE run memcached -- pifpaf --env-prefix INDEX run postgresql $SHELL
$ env | grep STORAGE
STORAGE_DATA=/var/folders/7k/pwdhb_mj2cv4zyr0kyrlzjx40000gq/T/tmpVreJ0J
STORAGE_MEMCACHED_PORT=11212
STORAGE_URL=memcached://localhost:11212
STORAGE_PID=71019
STORAGE_DAEMON=memcached
STORAGE_MEMCACHED_URL=memcached://localhost:11212
$ env | grep INDEX
INDEX_DATA=/var/folders/7k/pwdhb_mj2cv4zyr0kyrlzjx40000gq/T/tmphAG7tf
INDEX_URL=postgresql://localhost/postgres?host=/var/folders/7k/pwdhb_mj2cv4zyr0kyrlzjx40000gq/T/tmphAG7tf&port=9824
INDEX_PID=71021
INDEX_DAEMON=postgresql
INDEX_POSTGRESQL_URL=postgresql://localhost/postgres?host=/var/folders/7k/pwdhb_mj2cv4zyr0kyrlzjx40000gq/T/tmphAG7tf&port=9824
$ echo $PIFPAF_URLS
memcached://localhost:11212;postgresql://localhost/postgres?host=/var/folders/7k/pwdhb_mj2cv4zyr0kyrlzjx40000gq/T/tmpQ2BWFH&port=9824

The PIFPAF_URLS environment variable will contain the list of all URLs detected and set-up by Pifpaf. You can override this variable name with the --global-urls-variable option.

Pifpaf will start the asked daemon using the current Posix user. The data file of the daemon will be placed in a temporary directory. The system-wide configured daemon that might exists is not touched at all.

Pifpaf expected to find daemon binaries on your system (like mysql, mysqld, pg_config, pg_ctl, rabbitmq-server, etc).

When the Python fixture is cleaned or when Pifpaf is terminated, the daemon is stopped and the temporary directory removed.