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GrecAndrei edited this page Sep 1, 2026 · 1 revision

Live IDA validation

Fake IDB and host tests are useful for fast feedback, but they do not establish that an operation behaves correctly inside a real IDA runtime. Live integration tests are opt-in and require a licensed local IDA installation and a target binary.

What to validate live

When a change touches IDA-side behavior, validate the smallest relevant path:

  • session creation and analysis completion;
  • decompilation, disassembly, and xrefs;
  • the intended IDB mutation and its persisted result;
  • snapshot or undo behavior when rollback is involved;
  • retrieval against the selected backend and model;
  • architecture-specific behavior for firmware or raw blobs.

Record the IDA version, runtime mode, binary, retrieval backend, and model when reporting results. Do not present fake-test results as live IDA behavior.

Run the live scope

The live tests live under tests/integration/ and are intentionally not part of the fast default suite. Follow the repository's Live IDA testing instructions for the required environment and runner options.

The basic invocation is:

IDA_MCP_LIVE_TEST=1 IDA_MCP_LIVE_IDADIR=/path/to/ida \
  pytest -q tests/integration

Use IDADIR or IDA_DIR instead of IDA_MCP_LIVE_IDADIR when that is how the IDA installation is exposed. IDA_MCP_LIVE_IDAT can select an executable directly. The tests compile a temporary ELF fixture when no test binary is provided; set IDA_MCP_LIVE_BINARY to use an existing fixture instead.

A normal development loop can still run the non-live suite:

pytest -q --basetemp=.pytest_tmp

Run the integration scope separately only after configuring the licensed IDA installation and target binary described by the live-testing guide.

Validate from the MCP surface

For a manual smoke test:

  1. Open the target with ida_open_binary.
  2. Poll ida_session_status.
  3. Call ida_overview.
  4. Read one known function with ida_decompile.
  5. Verify a reference with ida_xrefs_to.
  6. If testing a mutation, snapshot first, acknowledge the operation, re-read the result, and restore the snapshot if it was only an experiment.
  7. Call ida_session_health before closing the session.

For a live failure, include the operation name, minimal arguments, expected and actual result, IDA version, Python version, operating system, and relevant runtime/backend details.

The repository metadata and README require IDA Pro 9.2 or newer. The optional idalib runtime path is experimental and requires an IDA 9.3-or-newer install with its idalib Python environment. The normal offline test suite and fake-IDB tests do not validate behavior inside a live IDA process.

References: live-testing guide, plugin metadata, version source.

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