Quick overview of podman system tests. The idea is to use BATS, but with a framework for making it easy to add new tests and to debug failures. Quick Start =========== Look at [030-run.bats](030-run.bats) for a simple but packed example. This introduces the basic set of helper functions: * `setup` (implicit) - resets container storage so there's one and only one (standard) image, and no running containers. * `parse_table` - you can define tables of inputs and expected results, then read those in a `while` loop. This makes it easy to add new tests. Because bash is not a programming language, the caller of `parse_table` sometimes needs to massage the returned values; `015-run.bats` offers examples of how to deal with the more typical such issues. * `run_podman` - runs command defined in `$PODMAN` (default: 'podman' but could also be 'podman-remote'), with a timeout. Checks its exit status. * `is` - compare actual vs expected output. Emits a useful diagnostic on failure. * `random_string` - returns a pseudorandom alphanumeric string Test files are of the form `NNN-name.bats` where NNN is a three-digit number. Please preserve this convention, it simplifies viewing the directory and understanding test order. Most of the time it's not important but `00x` should be reserved for the times when it matters. Analyzing test failures ======================= The top priority for this scheme is to make it easy to diagnose what went wrong. To that end, `podman_run` always logs all invoked commands, their output and exit codes. In a normal run you will never see this, but BATS will display it on failure. The goal here is to give you everything you need to diagnose without having to rerun tests. The `is` comparison function is designed to emit useful diagnostics, in particular, the actual and expected strings. Please do not use the horrible BATS standard of `[ x = y ]`; that's nearly useless for tracking down failures. If the above are not enough to help you track down a failure: Debugging tests --------------- Some functions have `dprint` statements. To see the output of these, set `PODMAN_TEST_DEBUG="funcname"` where `funcname` is the name of the function or perhaps just a substring. Further Details =============== TBD. For now, look in [helpers.bash](helpers.bash); each helper function has (what are intended to be) helpful header comments. For even more examples, see and/or run `helpers.t`; that's a regression test and provides a thorough set of examples of how the helpers work.