Testing cli programs + file operations

Question

I'm building a dotfiles manager program for uni in rust, and looking for ways to test aspects of the program. As far as I can see, it can be broken into 2 parts:

• unit testing for logic and individual functions
• testing that it does what it should do irl (eg. correctly moving/renaming/linking files)

The first one isn't a problem, but for the second one I'm at a loss. It needs to be able to run in a confined environment, so if it does do something stupid it won't rm -rf $HOME or worse on me.

So my question is, are there any standard/good methods of testing programs like this? Are there tools available that would do what I'm wanting?

The only tools I've found so far seem to be custom built (like the test scripts for rcm for example), or Aruba (which seems like it could work, but I'm struggling to see how this could be used effectively in this case - especially since it involves heaps of files and directories.

Thanks.

EDIT: seems stackoveflow doesn't like this style of question (asking for opinions). Still interested in a definitive answer to this, assuming one exists of course. Maybe this is a program that needs to be written? For my project I ended up using custom bash scripts - not super ideal and doesn't run in a confined environment, but was the best option I could come up with.

Answer 1

Its seems to me that you want to functionally test your application and are wondering what tools to use to do this. It is valid to ask for opinions in the QA/Test space because being QA's we will validate these opinions for our own cases before using them unlike programmers ;-)

As a test automation task this can actually be very simple , i'm guessing your application saves, restores and patches dotfiles and doesn't have complex interactions with other services and processes (e.g. networkmanager, dbus etc) so can just be run by command line options.

I think your choice of using shell scripts to test this is fine here because for me the most important part of test automation is exercise the code in the simplest and most understandable way possible.

I can't see many test tools adding much more to this than a shell script with a function to run a command and report which of a bunch of files have changed. This function could then be run over bunches of combinations of actions to check for specific results. A little bit of setup code might help to normalise the environment and or create a new user to do this with.

If you do want to try a framework then have a look at bats which provides a tap compliant test runner for bash based tests. https://github.com/sstephenson/bats

There is absolutely no need to attempt to test this in Rust , its a fascinating language with innovating memory safety at its core but its major overkill for tests unless you are specically testing Rust API calls.