Unit-testing shell scripts and tools with shtk - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev).
While working on this static blog a few days ago, I made a change to its templates that warranted an automated test. I could have written a trivial shell script to do it, but instead I reached out for shtk’s unit-testing module. I tweeted about it right away to just say that you can, in fact, write tests in shell because lots of developers are skeptical about any script longer than 10 lines of code.
Interestingly, this reply came through: a pointer to a contemporary, under-development library for writing tests in Bash. Which made me think: “Hey, I had already done that years ago… but nobody knows about it. Gotta fix that with a blog post!” But first, I had to bring shtk back from its ashes because I had not touched it for more than 6 years and it wasn’t read for show and tell. So I did something that I wanted to do back in the day but never did: I put together a website for shtk to host its reference manual and I fixed a few obvious rough edges.
With those tweaks out of the way, we come to this article. In here, I want to show you how writing decent tests in shell is entirely possible and how shtk’s testing platform provides unique features to do integration testing of CLI apps written in any language.
Read in full here:
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