batou is a configuration management and deployment tool, comparable to Ansible.

With batou you can deploy applications, also from git repositories.

For this batou uses the git binary - so this has to be tested somehow.

One test looks like this…

def test_git_remote_init_pull(tmpdir):
    source = tmpdir.mkdir("source")
    dest = tmpdir.mkdir("dest")
    with source.as_cwd():
        remote_core.cmd("git init")
        source.join("foo.txt").write("bar")
        remote_core.cmd("git add foo.txt")
        remote_core.cmd("git commit -m bar")

        remote_core.ensure_repository(str(dest), "git-bundle")
        remote_core.git_pull_code(str(source), "master")
        remote_core.git_update_working_copy("master")

    assert "bar" == dest.join("foo.txt").read()

… and worked in some environments, even on Travis, but failed on my Ubuntu box, and later also on GH Actions:

batou.remote_core.CmdError: ('git commit -m bar', 128, b'', b'Author identity unknown\n\n*** Please tell me who you are.\n\nRun\n\n  git config --global user.email "you@example.com"\n  git config --global user.name "Your Name"\n\nto set your account\'s default identity.\nOmit --global to set the identity only in this repository.\n\nfatal: empty ident name (for <runner@fv-az18-857.2cpogp2qopau1j0uik42oh12ub.cx.internal.cloudapp.net>) not allowed\n')

While this puzzled me for some time, there is a simple solution.

git pulls its configuration from various places, also from the environment!

git needs to be configured properly

In order to use git, you need to configure it properly, ie set up an user and an email address.

one solution

Basically, you need to both setup a committer and an author (difference).

This resulted in code like this…

@mock.patch.dict(
    os.environ,
    {
        "GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL": "test@example.com",
        "GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL": "test@example.com",
    },
)
def test_git_remote_init_pull(tmpdir):
   ...

This is ok for one or two tests, but if you have more tests, you should convert this into a fixture.

@pytest.fixture
def ensure_git_config(monkeypatch):
    monkeypatch.setitem(os.environ, "GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL", "test@example.com")
    monkeypatch.setitem(os.environ, "GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL", "test@example.com")

So you can write your test as …

def test_git_remote_init_pull(tmpdir, ensure_git_config):
    ...

or, if you want the configuration be set for all tests you can use autouse…

@pytest.fixture(autouse=True)
def ensure_git_config(monkeypatch):
    ....

bonus: use git in CI

If you directly use git, e.g. in your CI pipeline, you can use the following command:

git -c user.name ... -c user.email ... commit ...

thanks

Thanks to Anthony Sottile - once again!