Debugging SSoT Jobs

When debugging SSoT jobs, it can be quite time-consuming to run the full job against the system fo record any time you make a change. As such, this page aims to describe steps to make this process easier.

Debugging Model Methods

In order to debug the create, update, and delete methods on SSoT models, you can employ the following steps:

• Start a Python interpreter in the Nautobot environment with nautobot-server shell_plus
• Import your model into the interpreter (e.g. from nautobot_ssot.integrations.aci.diffsync.models.nautobot import NautobotTenant)
• Test the individual method you want to test directly:

from nautobot_ssot.integrations.aci.diffsync.models.nautobot import NautobotTenant
# Note: You might need to instantiate your actual adapter and pass it in as the diffsync parameter, this may be the case
# if you are doing logging. `unittest.MagicMock` can help here as a substitute for e.g. an actual job class.
# If you want to test `create`
NautobotTenant.create(diffsync=None, ids={"name": "Company A"}, attrs={"site_tag": "Something"})
tenant = NautobotTenant(name="Company A", site_tag="Something")
# If you want to test `update`
tenant.update(attrs={"site_tag": "Something else"})
# If you want to test `delete`
tenant.delete()

This way you can mock the SSoT framework itself calling these methods, and even insert breakpoints in places where you need to jump in with a debugger.

Debugging the Adapter(s) and the diff

If you want to debug the adapters themselves, you can use a similar approach:

from nautobot_ssot.integrations.aci.diffsync.adapters.aci import AciAdapter
from nautobot_ssot.integrations.aci.diffsync.adapters.nautobot import NautobotAdapter
# For each adapter you will probably need some kind of API client or similar piece of software.
# This will be different depending on how your adapter is implemented. Here we just assume they exist already.
aci_adapter = AciAdapter(client=aci_client)
nautobot_adapter = NautobotAdapter(client=nautobot_client)

# This is what the SSoT job will call to load the data from your system of record
aci_adapter.load()
nautobot_adapter.load()
# At this point you can peek into the store of the adapters, the following example gives you all tenant objects loaded
# from ACI in a list.
tenants = aci_adapter.get_all("tenant")
# You can also look at the diff this way.
# Note: You will need to manually pass any flags that you are using here.
diff = aci_adapter.diff_to(nautobot_adapter)
# Now if you are satisifed you could even call the sync_to method to perform the actual data sync.
aci_adapter.sync_to(nautobot_adapter)

Note that again you can insert breakpoints in your code do dig deeper with a debugger.