How do I set up DNS and TLS certificates for my to-be-tested Nodes?

As with so many things with FediTest, you have choices:

• You bring your own.
• You let FediTest and UBOS Gears take care of it.

Choice 1: you bring your own DNS setup and TLS certificates

Use this setup if the Nodes you want to run against each other are already running at some public hostname, with official TLS certificates etc. This could be, for example, because you are running them in the public cloud, or with some kind of reverse proxy setup behind your firewall.

In this case, simply specify the respective values for the hostname parameter in your Node definition (see Node definition syntax) in your Test Plan.

This also works if you are on a local network whose DNS server has local records, and you issue your own TLS certificates from a local-network-wide certificate authority of your own. Some enterprises are that way, and, probably, a bunch of hackers on their home networks.

Choice 2: you let FediTest and UBOS take care of it

This only works if you run the Nodes with UBOS Gears.

If you set hostname parameters for your Node definitions in your Test Plan, UBOS will automatically set up local DNS resolution for them, so you don’t have to worry about it. (It uses systemd-resolved’s stub resolver that serves /etc/hosts content that is written by UBOS upon deploy.)

If you do not set hostname parameters in your Test Plan, FediTest + UBOS Gears will allocate a valid hostname for each Node, and automatically set up local DNS resolution for them. The hostname is derived from the name of the App at the Node, in an automatically created DNS domain that is either also automatically created, or that you can specify with the --domain parameter on feditest run.

If you provide TLS keys and certificate chain for your Node in your Test Plan through Node parameters (that would be unusual), FediTest will use that when setting up the Node. If not, FediTest will create a temporary, local certificate authority, and use it to create new certificates for the Nodes in your Test Plan. FediTest + UBOS Gears will make sure that these certificates are part of your system-wide trust store, so the Nodes you are running trust them, and also make sure that they are cleaned up after the Test Run is over.

Note: all automatically created DNS records, certificate authorities and TLS certificates are local to the system / VM / container you are running UBOS Gears on, and do not interact with the world outside. In particular, we do not touch your development machine.