clojure.test for Expectations

A clojure.test-compatible version of the classic Expectations testing library.

Where?

Try it out:

clj -Sdeps '{:deps {com.github.seancorfield/expectations {:mvn/version "RELEASE"}}}'

What?

This library provides a more expressive way to write tests than clojure.test, while still being fully compatible with clojure.test and all its tooling.

While clojure.test provides basic assertions using (is (= ... ...)) and (is (thrown? ... ...)), Expectations additionally supports predicates, regular expressions, Specs, and collection-based tests.

You can either "mix'n'match" clojure.test and expectations.clojure.test features in your tests, using deftest from clojure.test or defexpect from this library to wrap your tests, or you can use expectations.clojure.test on its own, since it exposes equivalents to all of the top-level clojure.test functions and macros for dealing with fixtures and running tests.

The following are equivalent:

(deftest my-test-1
  (is (= 2 (+ 1 1)))
  (is (thrown? ArithmeticException (/ 1 0))))

(defexpect my-test-2
  (expect 2 (+ 1 1))
  (expect ArithmeticException (/ 1 0)))

But you can also do things like:

(defexpect my-test-3
  (expect even? (+ 1 1))
  (expect #"foo" "It's foobar!")
  (expect ::adult-age 42)) ; ::adult-age is a Spec

See the example REPL session below for more details.

This library has no dependencies, other than clojure.test itself, and should be compatible with all existing clojure.test-based tooling in editors and command-line tools.

Works with Clojure 1.9 and later.

Works in self-hosted ClojureScript (specifically, planck). See Getting Started with ClojureScript for details.

Example REPL Session

What follows is an example REPL session showing some of what this library provides. For more detailed documentation, start with Getting Started and work your way through the sections listed there.

(ns my.cool.project-test
  (:require [clojure.spec.alpha :as s]
            [clojure.test :refer [deftest is]]
            [expectations.clojure.test
             :refer [defexpect expect expecting
                     approximately between between' functionally
                     side-effects]]))

;; mix'n'match libraries:

(deftest mixed
  (is (= 2 (+ 1 1)))
  (expect even? (+ 1 1)))

;; simple equality tests:

(defexpect equality
  (expect 1 (* 1 1))
  (expect "foo" (str "f" "oo")))

;; the expected outcome can be a regular expression:

(defexpect regex-1
  (expect #"foo" "It's foobar!"))

;; since that has only a single expectation, it can be written more succinctly:

(defexpect regex-2 #"foo" "It's foobar!")

;; the expected outcome can be an exception type:

(defexpect divide-by-zero ArithmeticException (/ 12 0))

;; the expected outcome can be a predicate:

(defexpect no-elements empty? (list))

;; the expected outcome can be a type:

(defexpect named String (name :foo))

;; the expected outcome can be a Spec:

(s/def ::value (s/and pos-int? #(< % 100)))
(defexpect small-value
  (expect ::value (* 13 4)))

;; if the actual value is a collection, the expected outcome can be an element or subset "in" that collection:

(defexpect collections
  (expect {:foo 1} (in {:foo 1 :cat 4}))
  (expect :foo (in #{:foo :bar}))
  (expect :foo (in [:bar :foo])))

;; just like clojure.test's testing macro to label groups of tests
;; you can use expecting to label groups of expectations (this uses
;; some of more advanced features listed below):

(defexpect grouped-behavior
  (expecting "numeric behavior"
    (expect (more-of {:keys [a b]}
                     even? a
                     odd?  b)
            {:a (* 2 13) :b (* 3 13)})
    (expect pos? (* -3 -5)))
  (expecting "string behavior"
    (expect (more #"foo" "foobar" #(clojure.string/starts-with? % "f"))
            (str "f" "oobar"))
    (expect #"foo"
            (from-each [s ["l" "d" "bar"]]
              (str "foo" s)))))

Just like deftest, the defexpect macro creates a function that contains the test(s). You can run each function individually:

user=> (equality)
nil

If the test passes, nothing is printed, and nil is returned. Let's look at a failing test:

user=> (defexpect inequality (* 2 21) (+ 13 13 13))
#'user/inequality
user=> (inequality)

FAIL in (inequality) (.../README.md:117)
expected: (=? (* 2 21) (+ 13 13 13))
  actual: (not (=? 42 39))
nil

The output is produced by clojure.test's standard reporting functionality. The =? operator is an extension to clojure.test's assert-expr multimethod that allows for Expectations style of predicate-or-equality testing (based on whether the "expected" expression resolves to a function or some other value):

user=> (defexpect not-at-all-odd odd? (+ 1 1))
#'user/not-at-all-odd
user=> (not-at-all-odd)

FAIL in (not-at-all-odd) (.../README.md:133)
expected: (=? odd? (+ 1 1))
  actual: (not (odd? 2))
nil

Here we see the predicate (odd?) being applied in the "actual" result from clojure.test.

Just like the is macro, expect can take an optional failure message as the third argument:

user=> (defexpect failure-msg
         (expect even? (+ 1 1 1) "It's uneven!"))
#'user/failure-msg
user=> (failure-msg)

FAIL in (failure-msg) (.../README.md:149)
It's uneven!
expected: (=? even? (+ 1 1 1))
  actual: (not (even? 3))
nil

Why?

TL;DR: Because I liked the "Classic" Expectations library but didn't like having to use custom, Expectations-specific tooling.

Why not just use clojure.test?

clojure.test is a great library for writing tests in Clojure. It's simple, it's built-in, and it's widely supported by the Clojure ecosystem. However, it only provides basic assertions and doesn't support some of the more advanced testing features that Expectations does.

Why not just use the "Classic" Expectations library?

Given the streamlined simplicity of Expectations, you might wonder why you would want to migrate your Expectations test suite to clojure.test-style named tests? The short answer is tooling! Whilst Expectations has well-maintained, stable plugins for Leiningen and Boot, as well as an Emacs mode, the reality is that Clojure tooling is constantly evolving and most of those tools -- such as the excellent CIDER, Cursive, Calva (for VS Code), and Cognitect's test-runner -- are going to focus on Clojure's built-in testing library first. Support for the original form of Expectations, using unnamed tests, is non-existent in Cursive, and can be problematic in other editors and tooling.

A whole ecosystem of tooling has grown up around clojure.test and to take advantage of that with Expectations, we either need to develop compatible extensions to each and every tool or we need Expectations to be compatible with clojure.test.

One of the big obstacles for that compatibility is that, by default, Expectations generates "random" function names for test code (the function names are based on the hashcode of the text form of the expect body), which means the test name changes whenever the text of the test changes. To address that, the new expectations.clojure.test namespace introduces named expectations via the defexpect macro (mimicking clojure.test's deftest macro). Whilst this goes against the Test Names philosophy that Expectations was created with, it buys us a lot in terms of tooling support!

Compatibility with "Classic" Expectations

expectations.clojure.test supports the following features from the "Classic" Expectations library so far:

• simple equality test
• simple predicate test
• spec test (using a keyword that identifies a spec)
• class test -- see named above
• exception test -- see divide-by-zero above
• regex test -- see regex-1 and regex-2 above
• (expect expected-expr (from-each [a values] (actual-expr a)))
• (expect expected-expr (in actual-expr)) -- see collections above
• (expect (more-of destructuring e1 a1 e2 a2 ...) actual-expr)
• (expect (more-> e1 a1 e2 a2 ...) actual-expr) -- where actual-expr is threaded into each a1, a2, ... expression
• (expect (more e1 e2 ...) actual-expr)
• (expect expected-expr (side-effects [fn1 fn2 ...] actual-expr))

Read the Expectations documentation for more details of these features.

Differences from "Classic" Expectations

Aside from the obvious difference of providing names for tests -- essential for compatibility with clojure.test-based tooling -- here are the other differences to be aware of:

• You use standard clojure.test-based tooling -- lein test, boot test, and Cognitect's test-runner -- instead of the Expectations-specific tooling.
• Because of that, tests run when you decide, not at JVM shutdown (which is the default with Expectations).
• If you have Paul Stadig's Humane Test Output on your classpath, it will be activated and failures reported by =? will be compatible with it, providing better reporting.
• Instead of the in-context, before-run, after-run machinery of Expectations, you can just use clojure.test's fixtures machinery (use-fixtures). As of 2.0.0, use-fixtures is exposed directly via expectations.clojure.test so you don't need to require clojure.test.
• Instead of Expectations' concept of "focused" test, you can use metadata on tests and tell your test runner to "select" tests as needed (e.g., Leiningen's "test selectors", Boot's "filters", and test-runner's -i/-e options).
• freeze-time, redef-state, and warn-on-iref-updates are not (yet) implemented.
• The undocumented CustomPred protocol is not implemented -- you can use plain is and extend clojure.test's assert-expr multimethod if you need that level of control.

Test & Development

To test, run clj -X:test (tests against Clojure 1.9).

Multi-version testing:

for v in 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12
do
  clojure -X:test:$v
done

You can also run the tests with Humane Test Output enabled but you need to exclude the negative tests because they assume things about the test report data that HTO modifies:

for v in 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12
do
  clojure -X:test:$v:humane :excludes '[:negative]'
done

ClojureScript testing

The ClojureScript version requires self-hosted ClojureScript (specifically, planck). Once you have planck -h working, you can run the ClojureScript tests with:

clojure -M:cljs-runner -e :negative

You can run the negative tests as well if you modify one line of test.cljc, see the comments below the line containing (def humane-test-output?.

ClojureScript REPL

It can be handy to try things in a REPL. You can run a REPL for ClojureScript by doing:

$ planck --compile-opts planckopts.edn -c `clojure -Spath -A:humane` -r
ClojureScript 1.10.520
cljs.user=> (require '[expectations.clojure.test :refer-macros [defexpect expect]])
nil
cljs.user=> (defexpect a (expect number? 1))
#'cljs.user/a
cljs.user=> (a)
nil
cljs.user=> (defexpect a (expect number? :b))
#'cljs.user/a
cljs.user=> (a)

FAIL in (a) (run_block@file:44:173)


expected: (=? number? :b)
  actual: (not (number? :b))
nil
cljs.user=>

This will set you up with defexpect and expect. Add others as required.

License & Copyright

Copyright © 2018-2024 Sean Corfield, all rights reserved.

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0.