Terraform Test: add the ability to run tests in parallel

[ron-matsliah]

Terraform Version

Terraform v1.6.3

Use Cases

In order to speed up the testing process, we would like to have the ability to run all the tests in parallel (which are not depended on each other)

Attempted Solutions

We tried to split our test into multiple testing files, but it seems the test still runs one by one and not in parallel

Proposal

Add the ability to run test in parallel

References

No response

[crw]

Thanks for this feature request! If you are viewing this issue and would like to indicate your interest, please use the 👍 reaction on the issue description to upvote this issue. We also welcome additional use case descriptions. Thanks again!

[omarismail]

Hey @ron-matsliah, the Terraform team is doing research into this problem, and I'd love to chat to learn more. Please reach out to me oismail@hashicorp.com and we can schedule a time to chat!

[brettcurtis]

I'd like to see this as well. I assumed it would run in parallel by default since that is what Terraform does. However, I think some explicit dependencies on other runs might be helpful when more complex tests are required.

Example:

run "default" {
  command = apply

  module {
    source = "./tests/fixtures/default"
  }
}

run "logging" {
  command = apply

  module {
    source = "./tests/fixtures/logging"
  }

  depends_on = ["default"]
}

[sleepwithcoffee]

This feature will be super useful if I have to test a "heavy" module like RDS, I want to run provision multiple database instances with different engines in parallel .

[garvitarai1]

Hey @sleepwithcoffee and @brettcurtis, I'm on the Terraform team and I'm doing research on this problem. I would love to learn more about your use cases! Please reach out to me garvitarai@hashicorp.com and we can schedule a time to chat!

[bassamicius]

Our team is very interested in this feature, it is a must have for our dev team to develop a terraform provider for our API product and we are seriously considering developping some other consumption channel for our product instead (like an ansible module).
If you have a way for a developper to run tests on their local machine in parallel, we are intrested.
For the CI pipelibe we use gitlab-ci parellel matrix to workaround this but we have no easy solution for local run

[brettcurtis]

@garvitarai1 - Our use case is straight forward, we only use test for our child module development. Recently we switched to the mock provider for better or worse and don't have the need to run tests in parallel anymore since the mock tests are fast. We've accepted the tradeoff of tests not building real infrastructure.