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Goss - Quick and Easy server validation

Goss in 45 seconds

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Note: For testing containers see the dgoss wrapper. Also, user submitted wrapper scripts for Kubernetes kgoss and Docker Compose dcgoss.

Note: For some Docker/Kubernetes healthcheck, health endpoint, and container ordering examples, see my blog post here.

Introduction

What is Goss?

Goss is a YAML based serverspec alternative tool for validating a server's configuration. It eases the process of writing tests by allowing the user to generate tests from the current system state. Once the test suite is written they can be executed, waited-on, or served as a health endpoint.

Why use Goss?

  • Goss is EASY! - Goss in 45 seconds
  • Goss is FAST! - small-medium test suites are near instantaneous, see benchmarks
  • Goss is SMALL! - <10MB single self-contained binary

Installation

Note: For macOS and Windows, see: platform-feature-parity.

This will install goss and dgoss.

Note: Using curl | sh is not recommended for production systems, use manual installation below.

# Install latest version to /usr/local/bin
curl -fsSL https://goss.rocks/install | sh

# Install v0.4.8 version to ~/bin
curl -fsSL https://goss.rocks/install | GOSS_VER=v0.4.8 GOSS_DST=~/bin sh

Supported resources

  • package - add new package
  • file - add new file
  • addr - add new remote address:port - ex: google.com:80
  • port - add new listening [protocol]:port - ex: 80 or udp:123
  • service - add new service
  • user - add new user
  • group - add new group
  • command - add new command
  • dns - add new dns
  • process - add new process name
  • kernel-param - add new kernel-param
  • mount - add new mount
  • interface - add new network interface
  • http - add new network http url with proxy support
  • goss - add new goss file, it will be imported from this one
  • matching - test for matches in supplied content

Supported output formats

  • rspecish - (default) Similar to rspec output
  • documentation - Verbose test results
  • json - JSON, detailed test result
  • tap - TAP style
  • junit - JUnit style
  • nagios - Nagios/Sensu compatible output /w exit code 2 for failures.
  • prometheus - Prometheus compatible output.
  • silent - No output. Avoids exposing system information (e.g. when serving tests as a healthcheck endpoint).

Community Contributions

  • goss-ansible - Ansible module for Goss.
  • degoss - Ansible role for installing, running, and removing Goss in a single go.
  • kitchen-goss - A test-kitchen verifier plugin for Goss.
  • goss-fpm-files - Might be useful for building goss system packages.
  • packer-provisioner-goss - A packer plugin to run Goss as a provision step.
  • gossboss - Collect and view aggregated Goss test results from multiple remote Goss servers.

Limitations

goss works well on Linux, but support on Windows & macOS is alpha. See platform-feature-parity.

The following tests have limitations.

Package:

  • rpm
  • deb
  • Alpine apk
  • pacman

Service:

  • systemd
  • sysV init
  • OpenRC init
  • Upstart