Testing post-install scripts

Question

I love to experiment with my Ubuntu GNOME 14.04, so there are many mistakes to be made and things to learn.

Often I want a clean install, so I made post-install script.

Question is: what is the best way (smartest, I mean), to test them?

Only way I know is to install it from scratch and then run script. But that is time consuming and most of the way it doesn't give the way to clearly see what is wrong.

My script contains regular things as installation of packages, adding PPA's, updating... But I want to automate it completely, so, for example, I am trying to find a way to silently install java related packages (without dialoque inside terminal) or to implement backed-up config files.

I am using Ubuntu 14.04. My current code can be found here.

P. S. In short, is there a simple way to include it in distro installation file?

Answer 1

I think https://github.com/tprasadtp/ubuntu-post-install has a way to simulate an installation. You can see it in local testing

from the docs

Script is tested using the simulate mode on supported versions of Ubuntu, Debian and Elementary using Docker. Test scripts can be found in tests directory.

and

You can use ./tests/local.sh --help to test the scripts locally. It uses docker to build and test the script in simulate mode inside containers. This script requires two arguments --distro and --release. They are used as parameters to build the Docker image from dockerfile in dockerfiles/tests.eg. to test the script on Ubuntu 18.04 bionic, run it as ./tests/local.sh --distro ubuntu --release bionic.