Merge pull request #656 from bastelfreak/ci

Add blog post about testing staging packages

Author: corporate-gadfly

_posts/2026-04-02-enhanced-module-and-openvox-agent-testing.md

@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: Enhanced module & openvox-agent testing
+date: 2026-04-02
+github_username: bastelfreak
+---
+
+Ever wanted to make changes to openvox-agent but unsure how to test it? We got you covered!
+
+Since a long time, we have [a workflow in the openvox repo](https://github.com/OpenVoxProject/openvox/actions/workflows/build.yml) to build all packages.
+Anyone with write permissions to the repo can trigger the workflow.
+The workflow takes a git ref (a branch name) as input and will take that as a source for the packages.
+All build artifacts will be published as GitHub artifacts and optionally to our [artifacts server](https://artifacts.voxpupuli.org/openvox-agent/).
+It usually takes around 10 minutes between finishing a build and publishing it to our server.
+
+[Due to recent changes in our Vox Pupuli module pipelines](https://github.com/voxpupuli/gha-puppet/pull/95), our module CI can now be triggered manually as well, not just by pull requests.
+
+This is very helpful to rerun the module tests on the HEAD branch of the module.
+
+![CI overview]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/static/images/run-ci.png)
+
+If the module has acceptance tests, there are also a few more options.
+
+![CI options 1]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/static/images/ci-details-1.png)
+
+By default, we generate a CI matrix based on the openvox/puppet major versions in metadata.json multiplied by all supported OS major versions in metadata.json.
+This basically allows us to test 5 different collections right now:
+
+* puppet7
+* puppet8
+* openvox7
+* openvox8
+* staging
+
+If you set the collection to `staging`, the first and third option in the dropdown become relevant.
+In the third option, you can provide a staging package version.
+
+![CI options 2]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/static/images/ci-details-2.png)
+
+
+Those versions map to the packages built by the [workflow in the openvox repo](https://github.com/OpenVoxProject/openvox/actions/workflows/build.yml).
+The first option lists the download server.
+It defaults to our own artifacts server, but users can provider their source if they like (for example if you built packages locally).
+
+You can already use this in our [puppet/example](https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppet-example/actions/workflows/ci.yml) repo and with the next modulesync_config release we will make this availablle to all our modules as well.