We're in the process of migrating about 50 internal applications to authenticate against Crowd. We're using automated integration testing, starting with kitchen and Puppet on developer's workstations, and continuing with larger automated deployments in short-term and medium-term test environments.

Note that the purpose of an integration test environment is to provide a reproducible, isolated environment to run the entire applications, or significant parts of it. External influences should be reduced to a minimum.

Right now, we can not automatically create a Crowd instance with a set of users and groups, and an app definition for the app under test. While we can install Crowd automatically, setting up the configuration requires the engineer to access the Crowd instance with a browser and import a backup of the test configuration manually.

Crowd should offer a way to at least automatically restore a given backup file, through a command-line tool or similar API, and enable installation and configuration of a test instance in a fully automated way.

Ideally, an API exists that allows our test infrastructure to configure Crowd according to the individual test requirements.