                               First steps HOWTO
                               =================


About this HOWTO
----------------

This short guide is a kind of crash course into basiliQA for the very
beginners. Alone, it will not give you all details about writing
test suites with basiliQA, but it will hopefully give you a good start.


Creating your first test suite
------------------------------

To create your first test suite, please install on your workstation
the package basiliqa-authoring:

  # zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ebischoff:/basiliQA/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/home:ebischoff:basiliQA.repo
  # zypper ref
  # zypper in basiliqa-authoring

(adapt the repository URL to the distribution you use;
 the above URL is temporary, it should move to
 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/basiliQA/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/basiliQA.repo)

Go to some empty directory, and then type the following command:

  $ /usr/lib/basiliqa/create-testsuite/create-testsuite.sh

The program will open a text editor to let you modify the creation options.
Most important setting is the NODES= line, which defines the number of
nodes (of test machines) and their names. Default is one client and one
server.

Once you save the options, the test suite gets created. You will see
in current directory a spec file, a changes log, and a directory
containing the test suite itself. All of this can already be committed:
 - in some release management system, for keeping the sources under revision control;
 - to some build service, for building and publishing the test suite.

For more information about "create-testsuite.sh" utility, please refer to
REFERENCE-createtestsuite.txt.


Building your first test suite
------------------------------

(to be written)


Running your first test suite
-----------------------------

Once your test suite is built, you can use it from some Jenkins server
(which needs to be configured), or locally on your workstation.
We'll concentrate on second possibility here.

(to be written)


Modifying your test suite
-------------------------

At this point, you just created an empty skeleton. You will want to
modify it in order to create real tests.

To see how basiliQA test suites are packaged, please refer to
HOWTO-testsuites.txt. This will give you the needed theoretical knowledge
so you know what's going on here, and which files to change.

