Prancer Basic CLI installation¶

Prancer uses the popular Python3 language interpreter. You can run Prancer platform using the source code available on GitHub or the Pip package manager. Read on to learn how to install the dependencies for Prancer and the framework itself.

Installing Prerequisites¶

- Python 3.6.8 / 3.8 or 3.9
- pip3

Installing Python3 is relatively simple on most OS' as they will provide you with either a package manager, or for Windows, you will be able to find an installer on the official Python3 download page.

Assuming you are using a popular Linux distribution that is Debian or Red hat based, it should be as simple as running the following command from your terminal:

sudo apt install python3 python3-pip

or

sudo yum install python3 python3-pip

Please refer to the Python3 download page for instructions if you can't seem to install Python3, we cannot give support for this.

Installing Prancer using Pip¶

To install Prancer, you just need to run a command using Pip (the Python 3 package manager) to install the packaged version:

sudo -H pip3 install prancer-basic

To test that everything works fine, run the following command:

prancer --version

If you see something like:

Prancer 2.1.46

Then it means everything worked fine.

Note that if you are a Python developer and use an environment switcher or if you are a power user that played around with the aliases, you might need to just use pip instead of pip3. If you changed the alias, the prancer alias might not work properly as it expects python3.

Running Prancer from source code¶

The complete walkthrough to run the Prancer Platform from source code is available in our GitHub repository at: https://github.com/prancer-io/cloud-validation-framework

# Installing Prancer from source

If you want to run Prancer using its source code, then you can checkout the source code from our public Git repository on GitHub. This is a community available tool, anyone can download the source code, look at it, report bugs and even contribute to it provided the contribution rules have been observed properly.

Go to a directory of your choice, but not in your web application's project directory and then checkout the source code there. Assuming you have Git installed, just run:

git clone https://github.com/prancer-io/cloud-validation-framework.git

Then change directory to the cloned directory:

cd cloud-validation-framework

You will also need to install the requirements for the framework to ensure proper usage:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

export the following variables:

export BASEDIR=`pwd`
export PYTHONPATH=$BASEDIR/src
export FRAMEWORKDIR=$BASEDIR

From that point on, you can run the tool manually using:

python3 utilities/validator.py <arguments>

If you see something like:

usage: prancer [-h] [-v] [--db {NONE,SNAPSHOT,FULL,REMOTE}] [--crawler] [--compliance] [--file_content FILE_CONTENT] [--mastertestid MASTERTESTID] [--mastersnapshotid MASTERSNAPSHOTID]
            [--snapshotid SNAPSHOTID] [--env {DEV,QA,PROD,LOCAL}] [--apitoken APITOKEN] [--gittoken GITTOKEN] [--company COMPANY] [--createsnapshot] [--mastersnapshotfile MASTERSNAPSHOTFILE]
            [collection]

positional arguments:
collection            The name of the folder which contains the collection of files related to one scenario

optional arguments:
-h, --help            show this help message and exit
-v, --version         Show prancer version
--db {NONE,SNAPSHOT,FULL,REMOTE}
                        NONE - Database will not be used, all the files reside on file system, SNAPSHOT - Resource snapshots will be stored in db, everything else will be on file system, FULL - tests,
                        configurations, outputs and snapshots will be stored in the database REMOTE - Connect to Prancer Enterprise solution to get the configuration files and send the results back.
--crawler             Crawls the target environment and generates snapshot configuration file
--compliance          Run only compliance tests based on the available snapshot configuration file
--file_content FILE_CONTENT
--mastertestid MASTERTESTID
                        Run the framework only for the master test Ids or compliance Ids mentioned here
--mastersnapshotid MASTERSNAPSHOTID
                        Run the framework only for the master snapshot Ids mentioned here
--snapshotid SNAPSHOTID
                        Run the framework only for the snapshot Ids mentioned here
--env {DEV,QA,PROD,LOCAL}
                        DEV - API server is in dev environment, QA - API server is in qa environment, PROD - API server is in prod environment LOCAL - API server is in local environment.
--apitoken APITOKEN   API token to access prancer saas solution. (This argument is needed only when the --db is REMOTE).
--gittoken GITTOKEN   github/enterprise/internal github API token to access repositories. (This argument is optional only when the --db is REMOTE)
--company COMPANY     company name of the prancer saas solution (This argument is needed only when the --db is REMOTE)
--createsnapshot      To generate all the snapshots after crawler is completed.
--mastersnapshotfile MASTERSNAPSHOTFILE
                        To run crawler for the specific mastersnapshot file.

Then it means everything worked fine.

Installing MongoDB¶

MongoDB server is an optional installation to run prancer framework. It is possible to store all the output files on the filesystem. You need a MongoDB server to store snapshots of your resources but also, some of the configurations can be stored on it instead of in filesystem.

Optional dependency

You can specify a remote MongoDB server url in your configuration files. Therefore, you do not need to install it on your system. We will assume, in all examples, that you have such a server installed locally.

If you don't and want to use a distant server, remember to configure the dburl setting. See this in the configuration page. You can use the community edition of MongoDB and provided you are on a popular Linux distribution, it should be as simple as:

sudo apt install mongodb

or

sudo yum install mongodb

To ensure MongoDB works fine, run:

mongo

If you see the Mongo shell start, everything works fine, you can exit it.

Refer to the official MongoDB Installation for more information.

Upgrading Prancer Platform basic edition¶

You can use pip3 to upgrade prancer-basic executables on your computer. First, you need to know, which version you want to upgrade. You can browse different versions and find the latest available one. click here

The command to upgrade is: pip3 install -U prancer-basic==<latest-version>

For example, if you want to upgrade to version 2.1.46, you should run: pip3 install -U prancer-basic==2.1.46