Generate html report directory structure (mkdir -p)

[OverkillGuy]

Problem to solve

Generating test results in CI, the pattern I'm used to is a cross-tool test_results/ folder, in which we get a junit/ subfolder for junit-ish XML, a coverage/ folder for all coverage-related matters, and now a hurl/ subfolder for all hurl's output, mostly HTML. This looks like this:

test_results
├── coverage
│   ├── coverage.html
│   └── coverage.xml
├── hurl
│   └── index.html
└── junit
    ├── hurl_end2end.xml
    └── unit_results.xml

Note that the test_results/ folder doesn't exist in repo, it's generated by the first command that runs.
In CI during integration tests, that's hurl during the HTML report, but instead I get:

error: HTML dir test_results/hurl can not be created

Because I'm missing test_results/ root.
Note of course I could just create a .gitkeep empty file in that folder to keep it created, but I feel it's common to expect testing tools to be able to create result folders?

Proposal

Suggest enabling report-path creation like mkdir -p would, when given a report path that has missing parents, instead of crashing.

I'd personally expect this behaviour to be the default, but it's possibly surprising people, so maybe expose it as --mkdir-report flag if it's deemed unsafe by default.

Additional context and resources

Change in code might be as simple as changing this:

hurl/packages/hurl/src/cli/options/matches.rs

Line 157 in 2cac549

match std::fs::create_dir(path) {

-             match std::fs::create_dir(path) {
+             match std::fs::create_dir_all(path) {

Tasks to complete

• Confirm we want this behaviour
• Determine if there are more code paths affected
• Determine if we need a flag for this instead of defaulting to it
• Do the change
• Testing to confirm no threading surprise etc

[jcamiel]

Hi @OverkillGuy

Thank you for you detailed issue. It seems reasonable to me to create any intermediate subdirectory, it should be the default. I don't see any problem to implement it (I will check with the others maintainers),

Thanks!

[jcamiel]

Hi @OverkillGuy

This should be fixed now by #2555, will be available in Hurl 4.3.0.

Thanks for the report,