10 Jan 2010 robertc   » (Master)

Announcing testrepository


For a while now I’ve been using subunit as part of my regular development workflow. I would pipe test results to a file, use subunit to report on failures from that file, and be able to inspect all the failures at my leisure without rerunning tests or copy and pasting from far back in my history.

However this is a bit adhoc, and its not trivial to get good pipelines together – while its not hard, its not obvious either. And commands like tee are less readily available for Windows users.

So during my holidays I started a small project to automate this workflow. I didn’t get all that much done due to a combination of travel and coming down with a nasty bug near the end of my holidays – which I’m now recovering from. Yay health returning + medicines. If only we had medichines :) .

However, I managed to get a reasonable first release out the door this evening. Grab it from launchpad or pypi.

Testrepository has a few deps – all listed in INSTALL.txt. Folk on Ubuntu Lucid should be able to just apt-get them all (sudo apt-get install subunit will be enough to run testrepository). If you’re not on Lucid you can grab the debs manually, or use the subunit ppa (sudo add-apt-repository ppa:subunit), though I’ve noticed just today that that karmic subunit build there only works with python 2.5, not the default of 2.6 – I will fix that at some point.

Using Testrepository is easy if you are developing python code:

$ testr init
$ python -m subunit.run project.tests.test_suite | testr load
id: 0 tests: 114

This will report any failures that occur. To see them again:

$ testr last
id: 0 tests: 114

The actual subunit streams are stored in .testrepository in sequentially numbered files (for now at least). So its very easy to get at them (for instance, subunit-stats < .testrepository/12).

If you are not using python, you can still use subunit easily if you are using shunit, ‘check’ or ‘cppunit’. subunit ships with bindings for shunit and cppunit, and check uses libsubunit with the CK_SUBUNIT output mode. TAP users can use tap2subunit to get a subunit stream from a TAP based testsuite.

It’s still early days but I’m finding this much nicer than the adhoc subunit management I was doing before.

Syndicated 2010-01-10 12:27:50 from Code happens

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