[Scons-users] Build and run unit tests automatically on target build

[Mats Wichmann]

On 6/17/24 13:26, Matthew Ryan wrote:
> I've been looking for some way of building and running a unit test
> after another target is run, but so far have been unable to come up
> with a recipe.
> 
> The specific example is that of a C/C++ static library built by
> `env.Library()` - I want a setup where, whenever the static library is
> rebuilt, a unit test (built by `env.Program` and linked against the
> static library) is built and run automatically, and if it fails, the
> build fails, so anything later on that links against libfoo would not
> build.
> 
> Is such a thing possible?

A number of approaches have been tried over the years. It's not "native" 
to scons, which likes to deal in a dependency tree and figure out what's 
out of date and build that. if running a unit test produces a 
predictably-named output file you can wire up the plumbing so that file 
looks like a target, then it becomes more natural.

There's a wiki entry which isn't really that great:

https://github.com/SCons/scons/wiki/UnitTests

There was someone who wrote a blog post about it doing something a bit 
better - there are a couple of links in the wiki page.

Someone wrote up a github project for a cxxtest tool (whch doesn't help 
if cxxtest doesn't work for you, but the ideas might).

https://github.com/ptomulik/scons-tool-cxxtest

When I first started using SCons it was on a C++ project that did 
triggered unit testing (including some extras, like "if on Linux, also 
run valgrind on the binary"), I tried to fix the mechanism but as I was 
very new to SCons at the time I never came up with something I thought 
was better.  I can post excerpts of that approach if wanted, would take 
a little memory refresh as it's been about seven years.  In my aside 
from the first paragraph, the log produced by valgrind became a target, 
so that part was actually pretty solid.

This is just a quick response, feel free to ask more questions and give 
more details on what didn't work, etc.