Can I pass the VCAP_SERVICES to the test stage at the IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery pipeline?

Question

When in (unit) test stage I'm running the following commands:

echo "Installing Node Modules"
npm install

echo "Run Unit Tests"
npm run test-mocha

My problem is that I cannot access the VCAP_SERVICES in the test stage (job is set to unit test).

Is there a way to access / pass them?

Answer 1

The only way I see, is using the cf cli over the provided shell in that stage. But that would require authentication and you do not want to store your user date there for sure.

So one way would be to store the data in the provided environment tab for that stage. Then you have to adapt these data, in case something is changed, because it is not provided by the vcap file but that seems to be how it is for the test stage at least.

Answer 2

As already mentioned, the best way to use VCAP_SERVICES in the test stage is to set it yourself in the stage's Environment Properties configuration.

The pipeline is the build environment. It needs to be able to run even if the app is not yet deployed or has crashed. We sometimes copy in values from the runtime environment, but the build environment should minimize its dependencies on the runtime environment wherever possible.

There's also the question of the pipeline workers being able to access the runtime services specified in VCAP_SERVICES. For the services I've used in my pipelines it has always worked, but it's not a guaranteed thing.