package alcotest-js
Install
Dune Dependency
Authors
Maintainers
Sources
sha256=cba1bd01707c8c55b4764bb0df8c9c732be321e1f1c1a96a406e56d8dbca1d0e
sha512=eebb034c990abd253f526e848a99881686d7bd3c7d1b1d373953d568d062e3d5aaa79b6b4807455aaa9a98710eca4ada30e816a0134717a380619a597575564d
Description
Virtual package containing optional JavaScript dependencies for Alcotest
Published: 25 Jul 2024
README
README.md
A lightweight and colourful test framework.
Alcotest exposes a simple interface to perform unit tests. It exposes a simple TESTABLE
module type, a check
function to assert test predicates and a run
function to perform a list of unit -> unit
test callbacks.
Alcotest provides a quiet and colorful output where only faulty runs are fully displayed at the end of the run (with the full logs ready to inspect), with a simple (yet expressive) query language to select the tests to run. See the manpage for details.
The API documentation can be found here. For information on contributing to Alcotest, see CONTRIBUTING.md.
Examples
A simple example (taken from examples/simple.ml
):
Generated by the following test suite specification:
(* Build with `ocamlbuild -pkg alcotest simple.byte` *)
(* A module with functions to test *)
module To_test = struct
let lowercase = String.lowercase_ascii
let capitalize = String.capitalize_ascii
let str_concat = String.concat ""
let list_concat = List.append
end
(* The tests *)
let test_lowercase () =
Alcotest.(check string) "same string" "hello!" (To_test.lowercase "hELLO!")
let test_capitalize () =
Alcotest.(check string) "same string" "World." (To_test.capitalize "world.")
let test_str_concat () =
Alcotest.(check string) "same string" "foobar" (To_test.str_concat ["foo"; "bar"])
let test_list_concat () =
Alcotest.(check (list int)) "same lists" [1; 2; 3] (To_test.list_concat [1] [2; 3])
(* Run it *)
let () =
let open Alcotest in
run "Utils" [
"string-case", [
test_case "Lower case" `Quick test_lowercase;
test_case "Capitalization" `Quick test_capitalize;
];
"string-concat", [ test_case "String mashing" `Quick test_str_concat ];
"list-concat", [ test_case "List mashing" `Slow test_list_concat ];
]
The result is a self-contained binary which displays the test results. Use dune exec examples/simple.exe -- --help
to see the runtime options.
Here's an example of a of failing test suite:
By default, only the first failing test log is printed to the console (and all test logs are captured on disk). Pass --show-errors
to print all error messages.
Using Alcotest with opam and Dune
Add (alcotest :with-test)
to the depends
stanza of your dune-project
file, or "alcotest" {with-test}
to your opam file. Use the with-test
package variable to declare your tests opam dependencies. Call opam to install them:
$ opam install --deps-only --with-test .
You can then declare your test and link with Alcotest: (test (libraries alcotest …) …)
, and run your tests:
$ dune runtest
Selecting tests to execute
You can filter which tests to run by supplying a regular expression matching the names of the tests to execute, or by passing a regular expression and a comma-separated list of test numbers (or ranges of test numbers, e.g. 2,4..9
):
$ ./simple.native test '.*concat*'
Testing Utils.
[SKIP] string-case 0 Lower case.
[SKIP] string-case 1 Capitalization.
[OK] string-concat 0 String mashing.
[OK] list-concat 0 List mashing.
The full test results are available in `_build/_tests`.
Test Successful in 0.000s. 2 tests run.
$ ./simple.native test 'string-case' '1..3'
Testing Utils.
[SKIP] string-case 0 Lower case.
[OK] string-case 1 Capitalization.
[SKIP] string-concat 0 String mashing.
[SKIP] list-concat 0 List mashing.
The full test results are available in `_build/_tests`.
Test Successful in 0.000s. 1 test run.
Note that you cannot filter by test case name (i.e. Lower case
or Capitalization
), you must filter by test name & number instead.
See the examples directory for more examples.
Quick and Slow tests
In general you should use `Quick
tests: tests that are ran on any invocations of the test suite. You should only use `Slow
tests for stress tests that are ran only on occasion (typically before a release or after a major change). These slow tests can be suppressed by passing the -q
flag on the command line, e.g.:
$ ./test.exe -q # run only the quick tests
$ ./test.exe # run quick and slow tests
Passing custom options to the tests
In most cases, the base tests are unit -> unit
functions. However, it is also possible to pass an extra option to all the test functions by using 'a -> unit
, where 'a
is the type of the extra parameter.
In order to do this, you need to specify how this extra parameter is read on the command-line, by providing a Cmdliner term for command-line arguments which explains how to parse and serialize values of type 'a
(note: do not use positional arguments, only optional arguments are supported).
For instance:
let test_nice i = Alcotest.(check int) "Is it a nice integer?" i 42
let int =
let doc = "What is your preferred number?" in
Cmdliner.Arg.(required & opt (some int) None & info ["n"] ~doc ~docv:"NUM")
let () =
Alcotest.run_with_args "foo" int [
"all", ["nice", `Quick, test_nice]
]
Will generate test.exe
such that:
$ test.exe test
test.exe: required option -n is missing
$ test.exe test -n 42
Testing foo.
[OK] all 0 int.
Lwt
Alcotest provides an Alcotest_lwt
module that you could use to wrap Lwt test cases. The basic idea is that instead of providing a test function in the form unit -> unit
, you provide one with the type unit -> unit Lwt.t
and alcotest-lwt calls Lwt_main.run
for you.
However, there are a couple of extra features:
If an async exception occurs, it will cancel your test case for you and fail it (rather than exiting the process).
You get given a switch, which will be turned off when the test case finishes (or fails). You can use that to free up any resources.
For instance:
let free () = print_endline "freeing all resources"; Lwt.return ()
let test_lwt switch () =
Lwt_switch.add_hook (Some switch) free;
Lwt.async (fun () -> failwith "All is broken");
Lwt_unix.sleep 10.
let () =
Lwt_main.run @@ Alcotest_lwt.run "foo" [
"all", [
Alcotest_lwt.test_case "one" `Quick test_lwt
]
]
Will generate:
$ test.exe
Testing foo.
[ERROR] all 0 one.
-- all.000 [one.] Failed --
in _build/_tests/all.000.output:
freeing all resources
[failure] All is broken
Comparison with other testing frameworks
The README is pretty clear about that:
Alcotest is the only testing framework using colors!
More seriously, Alcotest is similar to ounit but it fixes a few of the problems found in that library:
Alcotest has a nicer output, it is easier to see what failed and what succeeded and to read the log outputs of the failed tests;
Alcotest uses combinators to define pretty-printers and comparators between the things to test.
Other nice tools doing different kind of testing also exist:
qcheck does random generation and property testing (e.g. Quick Check);
crowbar and bun are similar to qcheck, but use compiler-directed randomness, i.e. they take advantage of the AFL support the OCaml compiler;
ppx_inline_tests allows to write tests in the same file as your source-code; they will be run only in a special mode of compilation.