E2E Tests#

Testing in metacatalog#

metacatalog includes an icreasing suite of tests to assure functional correctness. As typical unittests would need some serious amount of database mocking and be of one magnitude larger than the database management code, it was decided to include end-to-end tests, as they are common in javascript frameworks.

The tests are implemented using pytest and can be run like that. They run common tasks like importing, editing and searching data and compare the results of queries against expected results.

On this path, some minor functions might not be covered by a unittest, but in a larger context, the tests assure that the whole application does what it should do.

Note

metacatalog is a one-man project. If you spot a function that is not covered and needs coverage, contact me via Github but be patient please.

Run#

Running tests locally#

The tests are designed to run on Github actions, by actually installing a PostgreSQL database and actually uploading data into the DB. You can run the tests locally, as well. You need to install:

pip install pytest pytest-cov pytest-depends

as these testing packages are not in the metacatalog requirements. By simply running:

pytest

metacatalog will install a new database instance called 'test_[a-z]8 with user postgres and password``postgres`` at port 5432. You can overwrite these settings by the environment variables:

POSTGRES_USER
POSTGRES_PASSWORD
POSTGRES_PORT

Note

After each test run, a DBNAME file will be added to the metacatalog/test folder, to track the current database between the tests. After the tests have finished, you should remove this file. This might be done by an optional cleanup tests in the future.

Clean up#

If you run a lot of local tests, or if your copy of metacatalog runs tests after upgrading (which makes a lot of sense), you will find yourself left with maybe hundereds of databases, as the test suite does not drop the database.

Run the following chunk to delete all databases that follow the naming convention of metacatalog tests:

sudo -u postgres psql -d postgres < <( sudo -u postgres psql -Atc "select 'drop database \"' || datname || '\";' from pg_database where datname like 'test_%';")

Warning

If you have other databases that start with test_, they will be deleted as well.