Every month on the third Thursday as part of our How To…Series, we feature a new post with a guide on how to solve a particular problem with SOAP UI with guest blogger Brendan Connolly. This month’s post looks at SOAP UI with Docker.
You can browse previous posts in the How..To SOAP UI series
How To…Test Client Timeouts and Delays
How To..Manage Basic Requests and Response Logging
How to…complete Parsing With Groovy
If you want to check out other posts in the How To Series on Appium and Selenium, you can view them here.
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So you have a SoapUI project setup and you have built out a nice a test suite, so what’s next? Tests are no good if you aren’t running them, and even better running them regularly.
You may want to add SoapUI to a nightly build or possibly even include it in your continuous integration pipeline. The challenge can be that SoapUI will have to be installed and your project file available for test execution.
Soap UI With Docker
To solve that problem we can use Docker. The heavy lifting has already been done thanks to a container created by Daniel Davidson. In his words:
By containerizing SoapUI and its runner, this allows you to have a portable SoapUI installation that lets you run your SoapUI projects anywhere!
Here’s how to run your SoapUI tests anywhere using docker and executing a few shell commands.
Installing Docker
For this How to, I have Docker for Mac installed locally on my laptop, but any system that can run a linux docker container will do.
If you are a Windows user don’t worry, Windows 10 supports running linux containers but best to check the docs
Installing the Container
Run the following command and docker will reach out to the [Docker Hub]() to pull down the docker file. If you aren’t familiar with Docker Hub, think of it as github for containers.
This command will install and start the SoapUI container:
docker run --name soapie -d -p 3000:3000 ddavison/soapui
You should start to see Docker downloading and installing the necessary pieces for the container.
Executing Tests
The container uses two simple http requests for interaction.
Get
We can drop that http://localhost:3000 into a browser and we’ll see the following landing page:
Post
As you can see the status pag has instructions for sending the cUrl request for executing tests.
At this point we basically follow those instructions and using cUrl, or your favorite client to POST the project file and test suite name.
curl --form "project=@/path/to/soapui-project.xml" \ --form "suite=TestSuite" \ http://localhost:3000/
Test Results
The http status code is your first indicator for of your tests results.
- 200 All Tests Passed
- 550 Test Failure(s)
- 551 No Suite
- 552 No Project
- 500 Exception Running Tests
Test output is also returned in the http body of the response.
This information and more details can be found at this containers Docker Hub Page
Cleaning Up
The following commands can be used to stop or remove the container once you are done using it.
docker stop soapie docker stop {id}
To remove
docker rm soapie
docker rm {id}
