efsdeploy, ssh, testing, and tty's

Some applications require tty’s, and that can be a problem for tests run under efsdeploy. Typical among these are applications that control the terminal (e.g., allow entering of passwords but do not display the data entered) and venerable curses applications.

Something to watch out for in your configuration is that in the example globals.conf, the ssh section contains the following:

[ssh]
        # Any required ssh options can be specified here
        options   = -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o LogLevel=ERROR

Normally, ssh does not allocate pseudo-ttys, but I recently helped a co-worker track down some failing tests in an application that used them.
The solution is to provide the -t option to ssh, e.g.,

[ssh]
        # Any required ssh options can be specified here
        options   = -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o LogLevel=ERROR -t

This can be done by simply adding that section to the efsdeploy.conf file for the release. If you find you need to provide that frequently, then consider adding it to your global configuration.