🧪 Create a test

Valet comes with a standardized way to implement and run tests for your commands and library functions.

Once you have created an extension and opened its directory, you can start creating your new tests.

📂 Test suites and test files

Tests are organized in thematic groups which are called test suites. A test suite is a directory which contains test scripts. All test suite directories should be created in the tests.d directory if your extensions.

A test suite can, for example, regroup tests for a particular command. Organize them as you please, you can even define a single test suite for all your tests.

The tests are then coded in .sh scripts directly under a test suite directory.

You can check the test suites defined for Valet to have an example.

Here is an example of directory structure for your user directory:

✅ Approval testing

In your test scripts, you will call your command functions or run any code that you wish to test. However, you will not directly do assertions like in other test frameworks (e.g. you will not do something like assert.equal (true, true);).

Instead:

1. You will just print what you want to the stdout (e.g. echo stuff) or stderr (e.g. echo thing >&2) file descriptors.
2. These outputs will be captured and appended to a test report file named results.received.md.
3. This file will then be compared to an existing file named results.approved.md which is supposed to be committed with your sources and which contains the expected test report.
4. If the files are different but the new received test if correct (or if the approved version does not exist yet), you can approve it and results.received.md will be the new results.approved.md.
5. When you run the test again, the 2 files will be identical, ensuring you that your tests still lead to the same results.

You can check an example of test report for the test library of Valet.

Each test suite will generate a different test results markdown file that can be approved.

🧪 Tests

Tests are implemented in .sh scripts directly under a test suite directory. The name of the script will determine the h2 header of the report file while the name of the test suite directory will determine the h1 header. You can have several scripts or one script per test suite.

✒️ Implement tests

Here is a very simple example of script to test a command function myCommand:

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#!/usr/bin/env bash
test::exec myCommand

This assumes that myCommand will print logs or something to the stdout/stderr, in which case the function output will appear in the test report.

In addition test::exec, you have access to many functions that you can use in your test scripts to build up the report file: libraries/test.

You are advised to check the tests for the test library, which also documents how to use each function:

• The test report generated.
• The test script.

The Valet [tests.d][valet-test-suites] directory contains many other examples.

🏃‍♂️ Run tests

You can run all your tests with:

valet self test

If you change your code or add new tests, you will have to approve the test results. While you can do it manually by copying files, it is recommended to auto-approve the results and then use git diff to review the changes. You can auto-approve all test results by using the -a option:

valet self test -a

Once you have validated the approved version, you can commit it. Or revert to the HEAD version if something went wrong.

You can also exclude or include test suite using -i and -e options (check valet self test -h for more). E.g.:

valet self test -i my-test-suite

🪝 Test hooks

In addition to the test scripts, you can create other specific scripts which will be source’d at different time during the tests execution: