Unit Testing game/lib

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1

I'm new to unit testing and have some problems with it, can someone please help me to set up environment to test my lib?
@james

2

We use LuaUnit to test the SDK and firmware in the simulator and device. If you want to use it you can do the following:

IMPORTANT: we're using luaunit 3.2.1. YMMV with other version.

  1. copy the luaunit source into your source folder

  2. Add these patch files to the lauunit source folder.
    panic-luaunit.zip (22.2 KB)

  3. In your main.lua add the following to the top

import 'luaunit/playdate_luaunit_fix'
import 'luaunit/luaunit'

  1. Import your unit tests

  2. run luaunit with the following:

-- turns off updating
playdate.stop()

-- when outputting a table, include a table address
luaunit.PRINT_TABLE_REF_IN_ERROR_MSG = true

-- process the command line args (if any)
local testOutputFilename = "test_output"
local outputType = "text"
local luaunit_args = {'--output', 'text', '--verbose', '-r'}

-- run the tests
local returnValue = luaunit.LuaUnit.run(table.unpack(luaunit_args))

print("unit test return value = "..returnValue)

CAVEATS: I haven't tested these instructions directly. They're simply taken from what we're doing with our own code.

9 Likes
3

That thank you for the detailed answer!

4

Hi Whitebrim, did you get this working? I'm pretty new to lua (and the playdate itself!) but would like to warm embrace of unit tests to help play with stuff :smile:.

1 Like
5

You can find my code here: https://github.com/Whitebrim/AnimatedSprite/tree/master/tests%2Funit-tests%2Fsource

6

Ah nice!

I got something working after much mashing my head off the wall, but I like your solution for setup and teardown so might steal it (my over complex solution looks like this currently https://github.com/neil-armstrong-fig/playdate/blob/5e0d925426ce7ae7e67f179a9373330a95213818/src/actors/Player-Test.lua).

Will have a closer look at yours later, thanks!

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7

I can confirm that this works, which is pretty sweet. Does anyone know where we can request to the playdate devs that they make a headless simulator so we can run tests like this in CI?

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8

I have been using this as well and really appreciate it. I recently attempted to switch to version 3.4 because I'd like the option to skip tests, however my naive attempts lead to an immediate crash of the simulator. Anyone gotten a more recent version working?

9

I spoke too soon. I got suspicious that there were no crash logs anywhere, at which point I discovered this in playdate_luaunit_fix.lua:

function os.exit(value)
    if playdate.isSimulator then
	    playdate.simulator.exit(value)
    end
end

After commenting out the exit I was able to access the command output to discover that there's an error in the command line flags being passed to LuaUnit in main.lua. The -r (repeat) flag is provided, but there's no number of repetitions specified, and evidently in the new version that's enforced. Just add an additional argument to the list to specify a number (or remove the -r entirely) and it works like a charm:

local luaunit_args = {'--output', 'text', '--verbose', '-r', '3'}