30.1 A way to organise a test suite ¶

A useful way to organise a test suite is to split it into a set of files: one for each module to be tested.

The file libmbfl-tests.bash must be sourced at the beginning of each test file. This means that the variables that you set may interfere with the ones in the library; this should not happen because the test library prefixes variable names with mbfl_ or dotest_, but one exception is TMPDIR: do not set it in your script, use dotest-echo-tmpdir() to access that value. Handling files in tests.

A not so automated example ¶

To understand how the library works lets examine a bare bones example. The function dotest should be invoked at the end of each module in the test suite; each module should define functions starting with the same prefix. A module should be stored in a file, and should look like the following:

# mymodule.test --

source libmbfl-tests.sh
source module.sh

function module-featureA-1.1 () { ... }
function module-featureA-1.2 () { ... }
function module-featureA-2.1 () { ... }
function module-featureB-1.1 () { ... }
function module-featureB-1.2 () { ... }

dotest module-
dotest-final-report

### end of file

the file should be executed with:

$ bash mymodule.test

To test just "feature A":

$ TESTMATCH=module-featureA bash mymodule.test

Remember that the source builtin will look for files in the directories selected by the PATH environment variables, so we may want to do:

$ PATH=path/to/modules:${PATH} TESTMATCH=module-featureA bash mymodule.test

It is better to put such stuff in a Makefile, with GNU Make:

srcdir        = ...
builddir      = ...
BASH_PROGRAM  = bash
MODULES       = moduleA moduleB

testdir       = $(srcdir)/tests
test_FILES    = $(foreach f,$(MODULES),$(testdir)/$(f).test)

test_ENV      = PATH=$(builddir):$(testdir):$(PATH) \
                TESTMATCH=$(TESTMATCH)
test_CMD      = $(test_ENV) $(BASH_PROGRAM)

.PHONY: test-modules

test-modules:
        @$(foreach f,$(test_FILES),$(test_CMD) $(f);)