testthat
Overview
Testing your code can be painful and tedious, but it greatly increases
the quality of your code. testthat tries to make testing as fun as
possible, so that you get a visceral satisfaction from writing tests.
Testing should be addictive, so you do it all the time. To make that
happen, testthat:
-
Provides functions that make it easy to describe what you expect a
function to do, including catching errors, warnings, and messages. -
Easily integrates in your existing workflow, whether it’s informal
testing on the command line, building test suites, or using R CMD
check. -
Displays test progress visually, showing a pass, fail, or error for
every expectation. If you’re using the terminal or a recent version
of RStudio, it’ll even colour the output.
testthat draws inspiration from the xUnit family of testing packages, as
well as from many of the innovative ruby testing libraries, like
rspec, testy,
bacon and
cucumber.
testthat is the most popular unit testing package for R and is used by
thousands of CRAN packages.
If you’re not familiar with testthat, the testing
chapter in R
packages gives a good overview, along with workflow
advice and concrete examples.
Installation
# Install the released version from CRAN
install.packages("testthat")
# Or the development version from GitHub:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("r-lib/testthat")
Usage
The easiest way to get started is with
usethis. Assuming you’re in a
package directory, just run usethis::use_test("name") to create a test
file, and set up all the other infrastructure you need. If you’re using
RStudio, press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + T (or run devtools::test() if not)
to run all the tests in a package.