Tool Server on Linux Tutorial

This tutorial demonstrates how to use Tool Server to connect to and control a tool on a (remote) Linux system.

Starting ecu.test

This tutorial uses the “RemoteCommandLinux” tool, which for security reasons can only be used with secure communication with Tool Server (see Secure connection to Tool Server).

Therefore a certificate (*.crt) with a corresponding private key (*.key) must be created for authentication. The creation can be perfomed in the ecu.test settings dialog at Local settings > Signing > Secure communication with Tool Server.

Starting Tool Server

First, Tool Server must be started on the Linux system. This tutorial assumes that the Tool Server has already been installed and set up. Further details can be found in the Usage on Linux systems section.

In order to activate the secured communication the following Tool Server settings need to be configured (see General settings of Tool Server):

  • Set the option SSL_ENABLED to the value 1

  • Set the option CertificateDir to the directory in which Tool Server searches for client certificates in order to verify them when establishing connections

  • Copy the certificate file (*.crt) previously created in ecu.test to this directory

Tool Server does not have a GUI on Linux systems, so it can only be started via console. To do this, the command tool_server must be run in a console running on the Linux system.

Tool Server has successfully started when the message “Listening on port 5017” appears in the console output.

The Tool Server port can be changed by adding an additional parameter at startup:

tool_server -p 5020

Not all tools supported by ecu.test can be used on a Linux system. A list of supported tools can be found in section Tools.

Creating a test bench configuration

In this step, a test bench configuration is created that connects to Tool Server. For a detailed guide on creating test bench configurations and connection to tools, see the How to access tools? section.

For this tutorial, a new test bench configuration is created and the Linux system is added as a new tool-host.

To do this, Remote (Tool Server) is selected and the host name of the Linux system is entered.

From the supported tools listed, the tool tracetronic: RemoteCommandLinux is used as an example. After adding the tool, no further settings are needed and the testbench configuration can be saved.

Creating a test case

In order to use the connection to the tool, a simple test case should be created that contains a file that is transferred to the Linux system and then checked whether the file exists on the target system.

In the ecu.test workspace in the packages folder, a new text file is created named “abc.txt”. This file is to be transferred to the Linux system.

A new package is created for this and the tooljob UploadFile is added to the test case from the Jobs tab. The localpath parameter is used with the relative path to the text file, i.e. “Packages/abc.txt”. The remotepath parameter needs to be filled with the absolute destination path on the Linux system, i.e. “/tmp/abc.txt”.

Afterwards the tooljob ListDir is added to the test case. The directory parameter is filled with the absolute directory path on the Linux system, e.g. “/tmp”. In addition the checkbox Evaluation is activated. In the now displayed evaluation section, the mode Unspecific is selected and the expected value is filled with the following expression: ('abc.txt', '.', False) in value. This setting checks whether the return value of the ListDir tool job contains a file with the name abc.txt and therefore the file exists.

The last step is to save the package.

The created package looks like this:

../_images/TutToolServerLinux.png

Executing the test case

The following steps are necessary to run the created test case:

  1. Select and load the created test bench configuration (See How to access tools?)

  2. Connect the tool “RemoteCommandLinux”

  3. Run the created package.

The test case should run successfully and the tooljob ListDir should have a SUCCESS rating.

More Information

If you encounter connection or communication problems between ecu.test and Tool Server, there may be helpful messages in the log files of Tool Server. The log files tool_server_out.log and tool_server_err.log are in the following folder:

<home directory>/.cache/ecu.test 2026.3/