file contents test regex seems to not be working properly

[chris-ratcliffe]

Hello. I have the following 2 tests defined:

fileContentTests:
  - name: 'hosts check'
    path: '/etc/hosts'
    expectedContents: [".*127.*"]

commandTests:
  - name: "check hosts"
    command: "cat"
    args: ["/etc/hosts"]
    expectedOutput: [".*127.*"]
    exitCode: 0

In reality, they do the same thing. Make sure the string 127 exists somewhere in the /etc/hosts file. The command test works fine, but the file content test errors out with:

=== RUN: File Content Test: hosts check
--- FAIL
duration: 0s
Error: Expected string '.*127.*' not found in file content string ''

Am I misusing the regex in the content test check? The fact that the error message seems to indicate that the file content string is empty is suspicious.

I am using version 1.10.

[Sam Gomena]

I think this is a problem with containers in general, they generate /etc/hosts at run time (for Linux distros at least). I did some googling and came across this SO answer which gives a clearer answer to why this happens.

FWIW, I fired up dive on a debian based image and indeed /etc/hosts is an empty file:

To further verify, running a fresh debian image and looking at /etc/hosts you can see it's recreated at run time:

So, I think the most straightforward approach would be to use your commandTests.