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| short-description |
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| Meson's own unit-test system |
Some tests require the use of command line arguments or environment variables. These are simple to define.
test('command line test', exe, args : ['first', 'second'])
test('envvar test', exe2, env : ['key1=value1', 'key2=value2'])
Note how you need to specify multiple values as an array.
Coverage
If you enable coverage measurements by giving Meson the command line flag -Db_coverage=true, you can generate coverage reports. Meson will autodetect what coverage generator tools you have installed and will generate the corresponding targets. These targets are coverage-xml and coverage-text which are both provided by Gcovr (version 3.3 or higher) and coverage-html, which requires Lcov and GenHTML or Gcovr. As a convenience, a high-level coverage target is also generated which will produce all 3 coverage report types, if possible.
The output of these commands is written to the log directory meson-logs in your build directory.
Parallelism
To reduce test times, Meson will by default run multiple unit tests in parallel. It is common to have some tests which can not be run in parallel because they require unique hold on some resource such as a file or a D-Bus name. You have to specify these tests with a keyword argument.
test('unique test', t, is_parallel : false)
Meson will then make sure that no other unit test is running at the same time. Non-parallel tests take longer to run so it is recommended that you write your unit tests to be parallel executable whenever possible.
By default Meson uses as many concurrent processes as there are cores on the test machine. You can override this with the environment variable MESON_TESTTHREADS like this.
$ MESON_TESTTHREADS=5 ninja test
Priorities
Tests can be assigned a priority that determines when a test is started. Tests with higher priority are started first, tests with lower priority started later. The default priority is 0, meson makes no guarantee on the ordering of tests with identical priority.
test('started second', t, priority : 0)
test('started third', t, priority : -50)
test('started first', t, priority : 1000)
Note that the test priority only affects the starting order of tests and subsequent tests are affected by how long it takes previous tests to complete. It is thus possible that a higher-priority test is still running when lower-priority tests with a shorter runtime have completed.
Skipped tests and hard errors
Sometimes a test can only determine at runtime that it can not be run.
For the default exitcode testing protocol, the GNU standard approach in this case is to exit the program with error code 77. Meson will detect this and report these tests as skipped rather than failed. This behavior was added in version 0.37.0.
For TAP-based tests, skipped tests should print a single line starting with 1..0 # SKIP.
In addition, sometimes a test fails set up so that it should fail even if it is marked as an expected failure. The GNU standard approach in this case is to exit the program with error code 99. Again, Meson will detect this and report these tests as ERROR, ignoring the setting of should_fail. This behavior was added in version 0.50.0.
Testing tool
The goal of the meson test tool is to provide a simple way to run tests in a variety of different ways. The tool is designed to be run in the build directory.
The simplest thing to do is just to run all tests, which is equivalent to running ninja test.
$ meson test
Run subsets of tests
For clarity, consider the meson.build containing:
test('A', ..., suite: 'foo')
test('B', ..., suite: 'foo')
test('C', ..., suite: 'bar')
test('D', ..., suite: 'baz')
Specify test(s) by name like:
$ meson test A D
Tests belonging to a suite suite can be run as follows
$ meson test --suite (sub)project_name:suite
Since version 0.46, (sub)project_name can be omitted if it is the top-level project.
Multiple suites are specified like:
$ meson test --suite foo --suite bar
NOTE: If you choose to specify both suite(s) and specific test name(s), the test name(s) must be contained in the suite(s). This however is redundant-- it would be more useful to specify either specific test names or suite(s).
Other test options
Sometimes you need to run the tests multiple times, which is done like this:
$ meson test --repeat=10
Invoking tests via a helper executable such as Valgrind can be done with the --wrap argument
$ meson test --wrap=valgrind testname
Arguments to the wrapper binary can be given like this:
$ meson test --wrap='valgrind --tool=helgrind' testname
Meson also supports running the tests under GDB. Just doing this:
$ meson test --gdb testname
Meson will launch gdb all set up to run the test. Just type run in the GDB command prompt to start the program.
The second use case is a test that segfaults only rarely. In this case you can invoke the following command:
$ meson test --gdb --repeat=10000 testname
This runs the test up to 10 000 times under GDB automatically. If the program crashes, GDB will halt and the user can debug the application. Note that testing timeouts are disabled in this case so meson test will not kill gdb while the developer is still debugging it. The downside is that if the test binary freezes, the test runner will wait forever.
Sometimes, the GDB binary is not in the PATH variable or the user wants to use a GDB replacement. Therefore, the invoked GDB program can be specified (added 0.52.0):
$ meson test --gdb --gdb-path /path/to/gdb testname
$ meson test --print-errorlogs
Meson will report the output produced by the failing tests along with other useful informations as the environmental variables. This is useful, for example, when you run the tests on Travis-CI, Jenkins and the like.
For further information see the command line help of Meson by running meson test -h.
Legacy notes
If meson test does not work for you, you likely have a old version of Meson.
In that case you should call mesontest instead. If mesontest doesn't work
either you have a very old version prior to 0.37.0 and should upgrade.