dev-smoke-testing

name	dev-smoke-testing
description	Write and run smoke tests — thin one-check-per-file scripts under scripts/test-<check-name>.sh|py that answer "is the build/deploy alive" in one command instead of clicking around by hand. Not a CI gate, not regression coverage. Trigger on "smoke test", "sanity check this deploy", "is the build healthy", "quick check this is working".

Smoke Testing

A smoke test exists to answer exactly one question fast: is this thing alive right now? It's a script an agent or a human runs on demand — after a deploy, after starting a service locally, before spending time debugging something that turns out to just be down — instead of manually curling endpoints or clicking through the app by hand. It is not a regression suite and not a pipeline gate: no CI job, no CD step, just a command run when someone actually wants to know. A smoke check that takes 10 minutes has stopped being a smoke test; it's just a slow, worse E2E suite.

Keep it to the one or two essential checks, each its own small script — when more than one is needed, run them together with a simple loop (for f in scripts/test-*.sh; do "$f" "$BASE_URL" || FAILED=1; done), no aggregator file to maintain.

1. What Belongs in a Smoke Test

Keep the list short enough to name from memory:

• A health/readiness endpoint — the service process is up and its immediate dependencies (DB connection, cache connection) respond.
• One or two critical paths, read-only where possible — "can a user log in," "does the homepage return 200 with expected content," not every route.
• A version/build-identifier check when deploys are easy to get wrong — confirms the expected build actually shipped, not a stale cache serving the old one.

Does not belong: edge cases, error-path coverage, anything requiring realistic test data setup, anything slow. That's dev-e2e-testing's job.

2. Location and Form

One check, one file, named for what it checks: scripts/test-create-user.sh, scripts/test-get-user-session.py — not a shared smoke-test.sh grab-bag. Bash if curl and exit codes are enough, which is most of the time. Reach for Python instead when a check needs something bash makes awkward: parsing a JSON response body, hitting a gRPC/websocket endpoint, or matching the language/tooling the rest of the repo's scripts already use — don't reach for it out of habit when bash already covers the need. Either way it's a plain script, not a test-framework suite.

Two worked examples (bash and Python) are in references/details.md.

3. Safe Against Production

Smoke tests often run against real, live environments — sometimes production, right after a deploy — so every check must be safe to run there:

• Read-only by default. If a write path genuinely needs checking, use a dedicated synthetic/canary account whose data is expected and excluded from real metrics — never a real user's data or a real transaction.
• Short timeouts, no retries that mask a real outage. --max-time 5 on every request — a smoke test hanging defeats "fast."
• Fail loud, fail fast. First failing check exits non-zero immediately (set -e) — don't run every check and summarize at the end; the point is the fastest possible "something's wrong" signal, not a report.

4. Run It, Don't Wire It

This is a script you or an agent runs by hand when you want to know something's working — ./scripts/test-user-create.sh <url> (or python3 scripts/test-get-user-session.py <url>) after a deploy, after a local docker compose up, before diving into a bug report that might just be an outage. Report the result plainly (which checks passed/failed) rather than assuming success. Don't add it to a GitHub Actions workflow or any other automated pipeline as part of this skill — if the project later wants an automated deploy gate, that's a deliberate separate decision, not something this skill does by default.

5. Verify Before Handing Back

Run the script against a known-good environment (must pass) and confirm each check actually fails when its target is broken (stop the service, hit a wrong port, or point at a nonexistent path) — a check that can't fail isn't checking anything.