Testing

As we know testing is integral to any piece of software! Rust has first-class support for unit and integration testing (see this chapter in TRPL).

From the testing chapters linked above, we see how to write unit tests and integration tests. Organizationally, we can place unit tests in the modules they test and integration tests in their own tests/ directory:

foo ├── Cargo.toml ├── src │ └── main.rs │ └── lib.rs └── tests ├── my_test.rs └── my_other_test.rs

Each file in tests is a separate integration test, i.e. a test that is meant to test your library as if it were being called from a dependent crate.

The Testing chapter elaborates on the three different testing styles: Unit, Doc, and Integration.

cargo naturally provides an easy way to run all of your tests!

$ cargo test

You should see output like this:

$ cargo test Compiling blah v0.1.0 (file:///nobackup/blah) Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.89 secs Running target/debug/deps/blah-d3b32b97275ec472 running 3 tests test test_bar ... ok test test_baz ... ok test test_foo_bar ... ok test test_foo ... ok test result: ok. 3 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out

You can also run tests whose name matches a pattern:

$ cargo test test_foo
$ cargo test test_foo Compiling blah v0.1.0 (file:///nobackup/blah) Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.35 secs Running target/debug/deps/blah-d3b32b97275ec472 running 2 tests test test_foo ... ok test test_foo_bar ... ok test result: ok. 2 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 2 filtered out

One word of caution: Cargo may run multiple tests concurrently, so make sure that they don't race with each other.

One example of this concurrency causing issues is if two tests output to a file, such as below:

#![allow(unused)] fn main() { #[cfg(test)] mod tests { // Import the necessary modules use std::fs::OpenOptions; use std::io::Write; // This test writes to a file #[test] fn test_file() { // Opens the file ferris.txt or creates one if it doesn't exist. let mut file = OpenOptions::new() .append(true) .create(true) .open("ferris.txt") .expect("Failed to open ferris.txt"); // Print "Ferris" 5 times. for _ in 0..5 { file.write_all("Ferris\n".as_bytes()) .expect("Could not write to ferris.txt"); } } // This test tries to write to the same file #[test] fn test_file_also() { // Opens the file ferris.txt or creates one if it doesn't exist. let mut file = OpenOptions::new() .append(true) .create(true) .open("ferris.txt") .expect("Failed to open ferris.txt"); // Print "Corro" 5 times. for _ in 0..5 { file.write_all("Corro\n".as_bytes()) .expect("Could not write to ferris.txt"); } } } }

Although the intent is to get the following:

$ cat ferris.txt Ferris Ferris Ferris Ferris Ferris Corro Corro Corro Corro Corro

What actually gets put into ferris.txt is this:

$ cargo test test_foo Corro Ferris Corro Ferris Corro Ferris Corro Ferris Corro Ferris