Functional testing PHP SSH2 workflows with PHPUnit and Vagrant

When $this->markTestIncomplete() just won’t do. Enter Vagrant.

To begin with the tools you will need to become familiar with at as follows:

Vagrant http://vagrantup.com
You will find many good write-ups on its installation and use. For the sake of brevity I will provide links to a few I found useful and not provide much detail on this. I suggest begining here: http://vagrantup.com/v1/docs/getting-started/index.html

PHPUnit: http://www.phpunit.de

There are four ssh2 authentication methods provided with the php ssh2 tools:
- ssh2authhostbasedfile — Authenticate using a public hostkey
- ssh2authnone — Authenticate as "none"
- ssh2authpassword — Authenticate over SSH using a plain password
- ssh2authpubkeyfile — Authenticate using a public key

For my project I needed to functionally validate a workflow of uploading a file to a server utilizing ssh2authpassword and ssh2authpubkey. To accomplish this successfully I need to test the following:
- Can I authenticate with the desired method?
- Can I validate the fingerprint of the servers key?
- Can I put the contents of a file to a known path on the remote server?
- Can I validate those contents and destination filename are as expected?

To accomplish this I needed an environment with a known public and private key this provides the fingerprint and both known keys to establish the connection without much work. For password based authentication I need an environment that will allow non-tty password based auth over ssh. This feature is generally disabled and must be changed at vagrant provisioning or you must create a image that is configured. Not wanting to create a custom box for this case I utilize the provisioning tools built into vagrant and sed. From here it’s really a matter of writing tests and running vagrant, take a look at the gist for examples I have provided.

Example Gist https://gist.github.com/3612867

The TL;DR:

• Write your tests
• Fetch the Vagrant SSH keys
• Create or grab the example VagrantFIle
• run vagrant init
• run vagrant up
• run the tests
• rinse / repeat