How to disable or ignore a test in bash automated testing system?

Question

I am having a set of .bat files . each file contains some tests. How can i disable one of the test ?

the following is an example

bashTester.sh

#! /bin/bash

bats -T --gather-test-outputs-in $OUTPUT/createEnvironment.bat
bats -T --gather-test-outputs-in $OUTPUT/protocolTest.bat

I want to ignore a test in the protocolTest.bat . The following are my tests in the protocolTest.bats file.

protocolTest.bats

@test "test1-protocol" {

}

@test "test2-protocol" {

}

how can i ignore or disable the test "test2-protocol" ?

Answer 1

There are two ways to skip tests with BATS:

• Marking a test as skipped in the code
• Filtering test when running bats

Which solutions works best for you will depend on the context of your question.

skip in the code

Quoting the "skip: Easily skip tests" section of the manual:

Tests can be skipped by using the skip command at the point in a test you wish to skip.
...
Optionally, you may include a reason for skipping:
...
Or you can skip conditionally

To give you an example of all 3 of these:

@test "test2-protocol" {
    skip # Just skip the test

    skip "Some reason to skip this test" # Skip with a reason

    if [ foo != bar ]; then
        skip "foo isn't bar" # Skip under specific circumstances
    fi
}

This last option, using a condition, would also allow you to skip the test when a certain environmental variable is (or isn't) set, giving you more fine-grained control.

For instance, if the test code look like this:

@test "test2-protocol" {
    if [ "${SKIP_TEST}" = 'test2-protocol' ]; then
        skip "Skipping test2-protocol"
    fi
}

and bats is called like this:

SKIP_TEST='test2-protocol' bats -T --gather-test-outputs-in $OUTPUT/protocolTest.bat

the test will be skipped. Calling bats without setting SKIP_TEST will run all test, without skipping anything.

--filter on run

Quoting the the "Usage" section of the manual:

  -f, --filter <regex>      Only run tests that match the regular expression

As the filter needs a match, we need to negate the test you want to exclude.

Given the example, something like this should work:

bats -T --gather-test-outputs-in $OUTPUT/protocolTest.bat --filter 'test[^2]-protocol'

More information about negating regexes can be found on StackOverflow