shelltest: command line program tester

Shelltest is a simple and compact method for testing command line programs. Tests are simple shell like scripts a command prompt that executes a command and its expected output. The shelltest utility compares the actual output of each command to the expected output, failing tests where the do not match.

Audience

While this tool can be used for shell-based testing of any program, it really targets python-based projects that wish to test their build artifacts through the standard unittest framework. For a more full featured shell-based testing tool, that doesn't specifically target python projects, see the shelltestrunner project.

Install

$ pip install shelltest

Usage

Example test file:

$ cat doc/examples/simple.sh
#!/usr/bin/env shelltest
> echo An example shell test file
An example shell test file
> echo $?
0

Running tests with shelltest command

$ shelltest doc/examples/simple.sh
doc/examples/simple.sh 2 of 2 (100.0%) passed

Running a shell test file

$ ./doc/examples/simple.sh
./doc/examples/simple.sh 2 of 2 (100.0%) passed

Add --verbose to show actual test output

$ ./doc/examples/simple.sh --verbose
exec: 'echo An example shell test file' ... passed
exec: 'echo $?' ... passed
./doc/examples/simple.sh 2 of 2 (100.0%) passed

Unittests

In a file that will be picked up by the projects test runner (e.g. nose, py.test), place the following.

from shelltest.unittest import create_unittests
create_unittests('doc/examples/')

create_unittests takes a path where shelltest files can be found. One TestCase is created for each shelltest file and a test method for each test in the file. The path argument is taken relative to the file that create_unittests appears in.

Shelltest files

Shell test files can end in either .sh or .shtest Each line starting with a '>' is considered a command and all text following it, up to but not including the next '>', is considered the expected output. Each command is executed and the actual output is compared to the expected output. If they do not match exactly then the test is considered to have failed.

Configuration Options

The header of a script file can contain configuration options that affect all tests in that file. Configuration options are of the format #[sht] key = value, with one per line and they must proceed all tests. See doc/examples/configuration_options.sh for an example.

Available options:

Option	Type	Description	Default
command_prompt	string	Command delimiter	>
command_shell	string	Shell to run commands in	sh -c
ignore_trailing_whitespace	boolean	Ignore trailing whitespace in expected output	true

TODO

• allow other types of comparison between actual and expected output