| Zonemaster::Engine::Overview(3pm) | User Contributed Perl Documentation | Zonemaster::Engine::Overview(3pm) |
Zonemaster::Engine::Overview - The Zonemaster Test Engine
The Zonemaster system is a quality control tool for DNS zones, produced in cooperation between AFNIC and IIS (the top-level registries for respectively France and Sweden). It is a successor both to AFNIC's tool Zonecheck and IIS's tool DNSCheck, and is intended to be an improvement over both.
The system as a whole consists of the test engine and, as distributed by the project, two different front ends. One is a command-line interface intended for use by experienced technicians, and one is a web interface meant for use by anyone. This document only talks about the test engine.
Conceptually, the test engine consists of a number of test implementation modules surrounded by a support framework. Anyone wanting to use Zonemaster to perform tests communicates with the framework from the "outside", and all modules implementing tests see the world entirely through the framework. Doing things this way lets us have features like the ability to test domains before they are published, to record entire test runs for later analysis and to make sure that test restults are (as far as reality allows) predictable and repeatable.
If all you want to do is run tests, you need to care about four or five modules. Zonemaster::Engine is the main access point to the framework, and it is via its methods that you set the configuration (if needed), request that tests be started and access the logger. The logger is where the test results end up, so that's pretty important. On top of those, you may want to use the Zonemaster::Engine::Translator to turn the results into human-readable messages.
There are two ways that you can get the results of a test you've requested: the simple-but-inflexible way and the flexible-but-complex way.
The simple-but-inflexible way is that all the methods in Zonemaster::Engine that run tests return lists of Zonemaster::Engine::Logger::Entry objects. Those lists include all the results that the writer of the test module(s) considered important enough to return by default. The advantage of this method is that it is extremely easy to use. The following is a functional (if not very useful) way to run a full test and print the results from a command line prompt:
perl -MZonemaster::Engine -E 'say "$_" for Zonemaster::Engine->new->test_zone("example.org")'
The main drawbacks of this method are that there is no choice about what messages to see, and it's entirely synchronous. The code that started the test does not get a chance to do anything at all until the whole test has finished, which may be several minutes later.
To get around those drawbacks there is the flexible-but-complex way, which consists of installing a callback that gets executed every time a message is logged. It's not that much more complicated, code-wise. The following example does roughly the same thing as the one above:
perl -MZonemaster::Engine -E 'Zonemaster::Engine->logger->callback(sub {say "$_[0]"}); Zonemaster::Engine->new->test_zone("example.org");'
If you try running those, you'll notice two main differences. First, the second variant prints results as they are generated. Second, it generates a lot more output. On my machine right now, the first example gives me 94 lines of output. The second example gives me 17684.
You can do pretty much whatever you want with the message objects in the callback (including modifying them, although we don't promise that behavior will stay around). If the callback code throws an exception, and that exception is not a subcless of Zonemaster::Engine::Exception, the callback will be removed. Note also that while the callback is running, the test engine itself is not. So think twice before you do potentially time-consuming tasks (like sticking the message in a database) in the callback. After waiting for responses from remote name servers (which usually stands for more than 90% of the time used), the result logging is the single most time-consuming task in a Zonemaster test run.
From here, you probably want to look at the documentation for Zonemaster::Engine, Zonemaster::Engine::Logger, Zonemaster::Engine::Logger::Entry, Zonemaster::Engine::Config and Zonemaster::Engine::Translator.
If you want to develop a test module of your own, the standard set of modules serve as examples.
As an entry point to the "inside" of the Zonemaster framework, you want to read Zonemaster::Engine::Zone and follow references from there. Of particular interest after the zone class should be the Zonemaster::Engine::Nameserver and possibly Zonemaster::Engine::Recursor classes.
If you do write your own test module, I would very much appreciate feedback on which parts were tricky to figure out, because I'm honestly not sure what I need to explain here. So please, if there's somethat that you think really needs to be written about, add an issue about at <https://github.com/zonemaster/zonemaster-engine/issues>.
Random recommendations and advice. May be replaced with more coherent developer documentation in the future.
| 2023-03-04 | perl v5.36.0 |