TestEngineering/UI/AMO/Tips and Pointers

Testing Add-on Uploading

• Add-ons need to have:
  • At least 1 category
  • A description...

before they can be complete; click on the "Complete Add-on" button to make them so

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AMO

• AMO uses Zeus, which heavily caches content. You can tell you're getting a cached copy of the content by looking at the headers and seeing "Via: Moz-Cache-zlb??" where ?? is a number and not seeing no-cache headers. being logged in bypasses this cache completely
• If you see some_string_define on AMO, it's either 1) a raw string define, or (more likely) 2) Apache needs to restart to pick up the gettext() changes.
• AMO runs on a cluster of servers. To tell what server is showing you the current page look for the "X-AMO-ServedBy" header.
• To view the revision of AMO you're currently seeing, view-source of any page; in the bottom, you'll see something like

  <!-- r24322 -->

  This means you're at SVN revision number 24322 -- you can cross-link this to whatever revision number was posted in the checkin comment in the bug.

• Pages won't validate due to some proprietary attributes we use (like "addonname") but it should be very close.

Production

https://addons.mozilla.org/

• Database queries are cached in memcache for 60 minutes. This means if you change something that doesn't invalidate the cache it won't actually change for up to 60 minutes.
• If you want a really fast check to see if basic infrastructure is working look at the services monitor. This is also one of the things nagios watches.
• Many scripts are run periodically via cron. This means certain things won't update right away (in addition to the cache timeouts). Some examples:
  • Calculating weekly download, total download, collections, and review stats happens every 20 minutes
  • Calculating the compatibility report happens every 5 minutes
  • You can see exact times and all cron jobs in bug 487503

https://versioncheck.addons.mozilla.org/

• Used by applications to see if their add-ons are up to date. Can be modified using about:config by changing

 extensions.update.url

• Should only output XML. Ever.

https://services.addons.mozilla.org/

• Used for the API.
  • In Firefox's "Get Add-ons" (Tools->Add-ons->Get Add-ons). This can be configured using about:config by changing

 extensions.getAddons.recommended.url
 extensions.getAddons.search.url

• • For external sites, both 3rd party and sites like addons.mozilla.jp
  • Should only output XML. Ever.

https://facebook.addons.mozilla.org/

• Only used for an old facebook app and not currently updated. bug 474466 decides its fate.

Staging

Found at: https://preview.addons.mozilla.org/

• The site updates from SVN every 15 minutes automatically. It also reruns the clean and build scripts which make the compressed js files, etc.
• The database is a very old copy from production AMO. It is only updated when requested through IT (talk to webdev first please).
• If you're feeling wild you can directly access the staging database to verify table structure or data.