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Urchin is an experimental language-agnostic lightweight cross-platform test skeleton written in POSIX-compliant shell, originally designed for test-driven server deployment at ScraperWiki.

Install

Downlolad Urchin like so

wget https://raw.github.com/scraperwiki/urchin/master/urchin
chmod +x urchin

Now you can run it.

./urchin

Writing tests

Make a directory named tests. Inside it, put files that begin with test that exit 0 on success and something else on fail. Then run urchin from the parent directory of the tests directory.

More about writing tests

Tests are organized recursively in directories, where the names of the files and directories have special meanings.

tests/
  setup
  bar/
    setup
    test_that_something_works
    teardown
  baz/
    jack-in-the-box/
      setup
      test_that_something_works
      teardown
    cat-in-the-box/
      fixtures/
        thingy.pdf
      test_thingy
  teardown

Directories are processed in a depth-first order. When a particular directory is processed, setup is run before everything else in the directory, including subdirectories. Use urchin_export, which works like export, to set variables in the setup function and make them available to other files in the same directory.

teardown is run after everything else in the directory. The "everything else" actually only includes files whose names contain "test". The test passes if the file exits 0; otherwise, it fails.

Aside from files named 'setup' or 'teardown', files and directories are run only if they start with 'test'. Thus, fixtures and libraries can be included sloppily within the test directory tree.