Tasty

Tasty is a modern testing framework for Haskell.

It lets you combine your unit tests, golden tests, QuickCheck/SmallCheck properties, and any other types of tests into a single test suite.

Features:

• Run tests in parallel but report results in a deterministic order
• Filter the tests to be run using patterns specified on the command line
• Hierarchical, colored display of test results
• Reporting of test statistics
• Acquire and release resources (sockets, temporary files etc.) that can be shared among several tests
• Extensibility: add your own test providers and ingredients (runners) above and beyond those provided

To find out what’s new, read the change log.

Ask any tasty-related questions on the mailing list or IRC channel #tasty at FreeNode (logs & stats).

Example

Here’s how your test.hs might look like:

import Test.Tasty
import Test.Tasty.SmallCheck as SC
import Test.Tasty.QuickCheck as QC
import Test.Tasty.HUnit

import Data.List
import Data.Ord

main = defaultMain tests

tests :: TestTree
tests = testGroup "Tests" [properties, unitTests]

properties :: TestTree
properties = testGroup "Properties" [scProps, qcProps]

scProps = testGroup "(checked by SmallCheck)"
  [ SC.testProperty "sort == sort . reverse" $
      \list -> sort (list :: [Int]) == sort (reverse list)
  , SC.testProperty "Fermat's little theorem" $
      \x -> ((x :: Integer)^7 - x) `mod` 7 == 0
  -- the following property does not hold
  , SC.testProperty "Fermat's last theorem" $
      \x y z n ->
        (n :: Integer) >= 3 SC.==> x^n + y^n /= (z^n :: Integer)
  ]

qcProps = testGroup "(checked by QuickCheck)"
  [ QC.testProperty "sort == sort . reverse" $
      \list -> sort (list :: [Int]) == sort (reverse list)
  , QC.testProperty "Fermat's little theorem" $
      \x -> ((x :: Integer)^7 - x) `mod` 7 == 0
  -- the following property does not hold
  , QC.testProperty "Fermat's last theorem" $
      \x y z n ->
        (n :: Integer) >= 3 QC.==> x^n + y^n /= (z^n :: Integer)
  ]

unitTests = testGroup "Unit tests"
  [ testCase "List comparison (different length)" $
      [1, 2, 3] `compare` [1,2] @?= GT

  -- the following test does not hold
  , testCase "List comparison (same length)" $
      [1, 2, 3] `compare` [1,2,2] @?= LT
  ]

And here is the output of the above program:

(Note that whether QuickCheck finds a counterexample to the third property is determined by chance.)

Packages

tasty is the core package. It contains basic definitions and APIs and a console runner.

In order to create a test suite, you also need to install one or more «providers» (see below).

Providers

The following providers exist:

• tasty-hunit — for unit tests (based on HUnit)
• tasty-golden — for golden tests, which are unit tests whose results are kept in files
• tasty-smallcheck — exhaustive property-based testing (based on smallcheck)
• tasty-quickcheck — for randomized property-based testing (based on QuickCheck)
• tasty-hspec — for Hspec tests
• tasty-program — run external program and test whether it terminates successfully

It’s easy to create custom providers using the API from Test.Tasty.Providers.

Ingredients

Ingredients represent different actions that you can perform on your test suite. One obvious ingredient that you want to include is one that runs tests and reports the progress and results.

Another standard ingredient is one that simply prints the names of all tests.

It is possible to write custom ingredients using the API from Test.Tasty.Runners.

Some ingredients that can enhance your test suite are:

• tasty-ant-xml adds a possibility to write the test results in a machine-readable XML format, which is understood by various CI systems and IDEs
• tasty-rerun adds support for minimal test reruns by recording previous test runs and using this information to filter the test tree. For example, you can use this ingredient to only run failed tests, or only run tests that threw an exception.
• tasty-html adds the possibility to write the test results as a HTML file
• tasty-stats adds the possibility to collect statistics of the test suite in a CSV file.

Other packages

• tasty-th automatically discovers tests based on the function names and generate the boilerplate code for you
• tasty-hunit-adapter converts existing HUnit test suites into tasty test suites
• tasty-discover automatically discovers your tests.
• tasty-expected-failure provides test markers for when you expect failures or wish to ignore tests.

Options

Options allow one to customize the run-time behavior of the test suite, such as:

• mode of operation (run tests, list tests, run tests quietly etc.)
• which tests are run (see «Patterns» below)
• parameters of individual providers (like depth of search for SmallCheck)

Setting options

There are two main ways to set options:

Runtime

When using the standard console runner, the options can be passed on the command line or via environment variables. To see the available options, run your test suite with the --help flag. The output will look something like this (depending on which ingredients and providers the test suite uses):

% ./test --help
Mmm... tasty test suite

Usage: test [-p|--pattern ARG] [-t|--timeout ARG] [-l|--list-tests]
            [-j|--num-threads ARG] [-q|--quiet] [--hide-successes] [--color ARG]
            [--quickcheck-tests ARG] [--quickcheck-replay ARG]
            [--quickcheck-show-replay ARG] [--quickcheck-max-size ARG]
            [--quickcheck-max-ratio ARG] [--quickcheck-verbose]
            [--smallcheck-depth ARG]

Available options:
  -h,--help                Show this help text
  -p,--pattern ARG         Select only tests that match pattern
  -t,--timeout ARG         Timeout for individual tests (suffixes: ms,s,m,h;
                           default: s)
  -l,--list-tests          Do not run the tests; just print their names
  -j,--num-threads ARG     Number of threads to use for tests execution
  -q,--quiet               Do not produce any output; indicate success only by
                           the exit code
  --hide-successes         Do not print tests that passed successfully
  --color ARG              When to use colored output. Options are 'never',
                           'always' and 'auto' (default: 'auto')
  --quickcheck-tests ARG   Number of test cases for QuickCheck to generate
  --quickcheck-replay ARG  Replay token to use for replaying a previous test run
  --quickcheck-show-replay ARG
                           Show a replay token for replaying tests
  --quickcheck-max-size ARG
                           Size of the biggest test cases quickcheck generates
  --quickcheck-max-ratio ARG
                           Maximum number of discared tests per successful test
                           before giving up
  --quickcheck-verbose     Show the generated test cases
  --smallcheck-depth ARG   Depth to use for smallcheck tests

Every option can be passed via environment. To obtain the environment variable name from the option name, replace hyphens - with underscores _, capitalize all letters, and prepend TASTY_. For example, the environment equivalent of --smallcheck-depth is TASTY_SMALLCHECK_DEPTH. To turn on a switch (such as TASTY_HIDE_SUCCESSES), set the variable to True.

If you’re using a non-console runner, please refer to its documentation to find out how to configure options during the run time.

Compile-time

You can also specify options in the test suite itself, using localOption. It can be applied not only to the whole test tree, but also to individual tests or subgroups, so that different tests can be run with different options.

It is possible to combine run-time and compile-time options, too, by using adjustOption. For example, make the overall testing depth configurable during the run time, but increase or decrease it slightly for individual tests.

This method currently doesn’t work for ingredient options, such as --quiet or --num-threads. You can set them by setting the corresponding environment variable before calling defaultMain:

import Test.Tasty
import System.Environment

main = do
  setEnv "TASTY_NUM_THREADS" "1"
  defaultMain _

Patterns

It is possible to restrict the set of executed tests using the --pattern option. The syntax of patterns is the same as for test-framework, namely:

• An optional prefixed bang ! negates the pattern.
• If the pattern ends with a slash, it is removed for the purpose of the following description, but it would only find a match with a test group. In other words, foo/ will match a group called foo and any tests underneath it, but will not match a regular test foo.
• If the pattern does not contain a slash /, the framework checks for a match against any single component of the path.
• Otherwise, the pattern is treated as a glob, where:
  • The wildcard * matches anything within a single path component (i.e. foo but not foo/bar).
  • Two wildcards ** matches anything (i.e. foo and foo/bar).
  • Anything else matches exactly that text in the path (i.e. foo would only match a component of the test path called foo (or a substring of that form).

For example, group/*1 matches group/test1 but not group/subgroup/test1, whereas both examples would be matched by group/**1. A leading slash matches the beginning of the test path; for example, /test* matches test1 but not group/test1.

Running tests in parallel

In order to run tests in parallel, you have to do the following:

• Compile (or, more precisely, link) your test program with the -threaded flag;
• Launch the program with +RTS -N -RTS.

Timeout

To apply timeout to individual tests, use the --timeout (or -t) command-line option, or set the option in your test suite using the mkTimeout function.

Timeouts can be fractional, and can be optionally followed by a suffix ms (milliseconds), s (seconds), m (minutes), or h (hours). When there’s no suffix, seconds are assumed.

Example:

./test --timeout=0.5m

sets a 30 seconds timeout for each individual test.

Options controlling console output

The following options control behavior of the standard console interface:

Custom options

It is possible to add custom options, too.

To do that,

1. Define a datatype to represent the option, and make it an instance of IsOption
2. Register the options with the includingOptions ingredient
3. To query the option value, use askOption.

See the Custom options in Tasty article for some examples.

Project organization and integration with Cabal

There may be several ways to organize your project. What follows is not Tasty’s requirements but my recommendations.

Tests for a library

Place your test suite sources in a dedicated subdirectory (called tests here) instead of putting them among the main library sources.

The directory structure will be as follows:

my-project/
  my-project.cabal
  src/
    ...
  tests/
    test.hs
    Mod1.hs
    Mod2.hs
    ...

test.hs is where your main function is defined. The tests may be contained in test.hs or spread across multiple modules (Mod1.hs, Mod2.hs, …) which are then imported by test.hs.

Add the following section to the cabal file (my-project.cabal):

test-suite test
  default-language:
    Haskell2010
  type:
    exitcode-stdio-1.0
  hs-source-dirs:
    tests
  main-is:
    test.hs
  build-depends:
      base >= 4 && < 5
    , tasty >= 0.7 -- insert the current version here
    , my-project   -- depend on the library we're testing
    , ...

Tests for a program

All the above applies, except you can’t depend on the library if there’s no library. You have two options:

• Re-organize the project into a library and a program, so that both the program and the test suite depend on this new library. The library can be declared in the same cabal file.
• Add your program sources directory to the Hs-source-dirs. Note that this will lead to double compilation (once for the program and once for the test suite).

FAQ

1. How do I make some tests execute after others?

   Currently, your only option is to make all tests execute sequentially by setting the number of tasty threads to 1 (example). See #48 for the discussion.

Press

Blog posts and other publications related to tasty. If you wrote or just found something not mentioned here, send a pull request!

• Holy Haskell Project Starter
• First time testing, also with FP Complete (tasty has been added to stackage since then)
• 24 Days of Hackage: tasty
• Resources in Tasty
• Custom options in Tasty
• Resources in Tasty (update)
• Announcing tasty-rerun
• Code testing in Haskell revisited (with Tasty)

Background

Tasty is heavily influenced by test-framework.

The problems with test-framework are:

• Poor code style (some lines of the code wouldn’t even fit in a twitter message!)
• Poor architecture — e.g. relying on laziness for IO and control flow. The whole story with :~> and ImprovingIO is really obscure.
• Non-extensible options. For example, when I integrated SmallCheck with test-framework (in the form of the test-framework-smallcheck package), I still had to submit patches to the main package to make SmallCheck depth customizable by the user.
• The project is effectively unmaintained.

So I decided to recreate everything that I liked in test-framework from scratch in this package.

Maintainers

Roman Cheplyaka is the primary maintainer.

Oliver Charles is the backup maintainer. Please get in touch with him if the primary maintainer cannot be reached.