What's the role of UBOS Gears in FediTest?

UBOS Gears has some unique features that are very helpful for testing Fediverse applications, such as:

• UBOS Gears knows how to install and configure complex server-side applications with a single command. For example, a single invocation of ubos-admin deploy can deploy Mastodon, configure the web server, set up TLS, provision a database, start the required background daemons, hook it all up and create an admin user etc. So setting up a test Constellation becomes real simple.

• UBOS Gears knows how to restore a previously deployed application to a previously saved state. This is also very useful for testing. A ubos-admin restore, applied to a UBOS backup file previously created with ubos-admin backup, will restore the application to the exact same state as it had been, including database content, uploaded media etc. This is notoriously difficult to accomplish for server-side applications.

• UBOS Gears knows how to deploy multiple instances of the same application to the same (virtual) host. So you can run two (or five!) Mastodon instances on the same machine. This is also very useful for testing if you want to run several Nodes against each other.

To use these features, you need to run UBOS Linux, typically in a virtual machine or Linux container.

However, the use of UBOS Gears is entirely optional. You can alternatively run FediTest on your PC or Mac or other Linux distro without touching UBOS. Then you won’t get the UBOS management features, and you need to either manage your application Nodes manually or implement something UBOS-equivalent yourself.