BasDrum

BasDrum is a simple wrapper around Bas (short for Behaviour Assertion Sheets), created by Christopher Giffard.

In short: You create Bas sheet files. Each ruleset in a sheet must specify an URL (pieced together from the ruleset's conditions). You run that sheet through BasDrum. BasDrum parses the URL from each ruleset, fetches that URL and runs lets Bas do its thing. When a bas test fails, BasDrum starts screaming and stops. This isn't pretty, but works great for integration into, say, nagios. (Incidentally that is exactly what I am doing with it.)

This current version is just barely functional and contains some unpretty behavior.

Installation

npm install -g basdrum

This is my first npm package, so I probably did everything wrong that can be done wrong. Sorry.

if this fails you can also just fetch the code from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/lasar/basdrum.git

Usage

Create one or several sheets as described in the next section.

Then execute the script like this:

./bin/cli.js path/to/sheet.bas

You can pass multiple parameters. You can also pass in a directory name. BasDrum will then use all files ending in .bas in that directory.

Add --verbose (or -v) to get more output.

The script will return the error code 1 if anything goes wrong or when one of the tests in a sheet fail. In case of an error in a sheet the script stops immediately. No further tests are executed.

Sheet format

Sheets are normal Bas sheets, with one constraint: Each ruleset must be of type @page and have conditions from which ann URL can be extrapolated.

The following conditions are handled:

• protocol: Defaults to "http"
• domain: No default
• path: Defaults to "/"
• url: The simplest way to define an entire URL.

Some valid examples:

@page (url = "http://www.example.com/some/path/") { … }
@page (protocol = "http") (domain = "example.com") (path = "some/path/") { … }
@page (domain = "example.com") { … }

For everything else, read the Bas documentation at the Bas homepage and the GitHub page.

TODO

• Get this thing into npm.
• Use Bas's annotation syntax to specify an URL instead of rule conditions
• When a sheet contains multiple rulesets with the same URL, that URL is fetched mutliple times. This could be optimized.
• BasDrum currently runs the contents of an entire sheet against every URL found within. This is not a problem, but also not pretty.