Testing plugins
How to write tests for your custom plugin code.
Introduction
In this tutorial, we'll learn how to test the custom plugin we wrote earlier. Pants documentation provides comprehensive coverage of the plugin testing and this tutorial should help you get started writing own tests.
Most of the plugin code that needs to be tested is in the following files:
rules.pywhere we implemented how aVERSIONfile needs to be read and how to use aversion_fileBUILD targettailor.pywhere we taught thetailorgoal about theVERSIONfiles and generation ofversion_filetargets
To author a test suite, it may make sense to write a very high level test first to confirm our code does what we expect. Let's write some integration tests for Pants so that we could run our goal from a test!
Testing with a complete Pants process
Pants provides a convenient way to run a full Pants process as it would run on the command line. Writing such a test would be equal to having, say, a Shell script to confirm that the output of the pants project-version myapp: command is {"path": "myapp/VERSION", "version": "0.0.1"}. Keep in mind that running custom scripts with this type of tests would require having a Pants repository set up (including the pants.toml configuration), creating BUILD metadata files and so on. When writing custom acceptance tests using pants.testutil package, you, in contrast, don't have to worry about that and can focus on testing your plugin logic in the very minimalistic environment containing only what's absolutely necessary to run your plugin code.
In the following code snippet, we define a set of files to be created (in a temporary directory that Pants manages for us), the backends to be used (Python and our custom plugin), and a Pants command to be run. By reading the stdout of a process, we can confirm the plugin works as expected (conveniently ignoring any unrelated warnings that Pants may have produced).
import json
from pathlib import Path
from pants.testutil.pants_integration_test import run_pants, setup_tmpdir
build_root_marker = Path.cwd().joinpath("BUILDROOT")
def test_reading_project_version_target() -> None:
"""Run a full Pants process as it would run on the command line."""
project_files = {
"project/BUILD": "version_file(source='VERSION')",
"project/VERSION": "10.6.1",
}
# This is a limitation of the current implementation.
# See https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/12760.
build_root_marker.touch()
with setup_tmpdir(project_files) as tmpdir:
result = run_pants(
[
(
"--backend-packages="
"['pants.backend.python', 'internal_plugins.project_version']"
),
"project-version",
"--as-json",
f"{tmpdir}/project:",
],
)
result.assert_success()
assert result.stdout.strip() == json.dumps(
{"path": f"{tmpdir}/project/VERSION", "version": "10.6.1"}
)
build_root_marker.unlink()
These tests do not need any special bootstrapping and can be run just like any other tests you may have in the repository with the test goal. They, however, are slow, and if there are lots of test cases to check (e.g. you want to test usage of flags and targets with various fields set), it may soon become impractical to run them often enough. You would most likely want to test your plugin logic in a more isolated fashion.
Testing goal rules
You can exercise the goal rule by using rule_runner.run_goal_rule() which runs very fast and does not start a full Pants process. In the test below, we register all rules from the project_version plugin with the RuleRunner so that the engine can find them when a test is run. These tests scale nicely and if your plugins are fairly simple, they may suffice.
import pytest
from pants.engine.internals.scheduler import ExecutionError
from pants.testutil.rule_runner import RuleRunner
from internal_plugins.project_version.rules import ProjectVersionGoal
from internal_plugins.project_version.rules import rules as project_version_rules
from internal_plugins.project_version.target_types import ProjectVersionTarget
@pytest.fixture
def rule_runner() -> RuleRunner:
return RuleRunner(
rules=project_version_rules(), target_types=[ProjectVersionTarget]
)
def test_project_version_goal(rule_runner: RuleRunner) -> None:
"""Test a `project-version` goal using VERSION files."""
rule_runner.write_files(
{
"project/VERSION": "10.6.1",
"project/BUILD": "version_file(source='VERSION')",
}
)
result = rule_runner.run_goal_rule(
ProjectVersionGoal, args=["--as-json", "project:"]
)
assert result.stdout.splitlines() == [
'{"path": "project/VERSION", "version": "10.6.1"}'
]
# Invalid version string is provided.
rule_runner.write_files(
{
"project/VERSION": "foo.bar",
"project/BUILD": "version_file(source='VERSION')",
}
)
with pytest.raises(ExecutionError):
rule_runner.run_goal_rule(ProjectVersionGoal, args=["project:"])
Testing individual rules
If your plugin is more sophisticated, and there are many rules, you may want to test them in isolation. In our plugin, there are a couple of rules we could write tests for. For example, the get_project_version_file_view rule reads a target and returns an instance of dataclass, namely ProjectVersionFileView. This looks like a good candidate for a very isolated test.
import pytest
from pants.build_graph.address import Address
from pants.testutil.rule_runner import QueryRule, RuleRunner
from internal_plugins.project_version.rules import (
ProjectVersionFileView,
get_project_version_file_view,
)
from internal_plugins.project_version.target_types import ProjectVersionTarget
@pytest.fixture
def rule_runner() -> RuleRunner:
return RuleRunner(
rules=[
get_project_version_file_view,
QueryRule(ProjectVersionFileView, [ProjectVersionTarget]),
],
target_types=[ProjectVersionTarget],
)
def test_get_project_version_file_view(rule_runner: RuleRunner) -> None:
"""Test plugin rules in isolation (not specifying what rules need to be run)."""
rule_runner.write_files(
{"project/VERSION": "10.6.1", "project/BUILD": "version_file(source='VERSION')"}
)
target = rule_runner.get_target(Address("project", target_name="project"))
result = rule_runner.request(ProjectVersionFileView, [target])
assert result == ProjectVersionFileView(path="project/VERSION", version="10.6.1")
Since we have extended the tailor goal to generate version_file targets in the directories containing VERSION files, let's write a test to confirm the goal does what we want. For this, we can continue using the RuleRunner. Let's create a temporary build root, write necessary files, and then ask Pants to get a list of targets that it would have created for us.
It's often very difficult to know how testing of a particular functionality is done, so it's worth taking a look at the Pants codebase. For instance, this tailor test has been adopted from this test suite.
from pathlib import Path
import pytest
from pants.core.goals.tailor import AllOwnedSources, PutativeTarget, PutativeTargets
from pants.engine.rules import QueryRule
from pants.testutil.rule_runner import RuleRunner
from pants.util.frozendict import FrozenDict
from internal_plugins.project_version.tailor import (
PutativeProjectVersionTargetsRequest,
rules,
)
from internal_plugins.project_version.target_types import ProjectVersionTarget
@pytest.fixture
def rule_runner() -> RuleRunner:
return RuleRunner(
rules=[
*rules(),
QueryRule(
PutativeTargets, (PutativeProjectVersionTargetsRequest, AllOwnedSources)
),
],
target_types=[ProjectVersionTarget],
)
def test_find_putative_avnpkg_files_targets(rule_runner: RuleRunner) -> None:
"""Test generating `version_file` targets in a project directory."""
files = {
"project/dir1/VERSION": "10.6.1",
"project/dir2/file.txt": "",
"project/dir3/VERSION": "10.7.1",
# Note that dir3/VERSION already has the target and should be ignored.
"project/dir3/BUILD": "version_file(source='VERSION')",
}
rule_runner.write_files(files)
for filepath, _ in files.items():
assert Path(rule_runner.build_root, filepath).exists()
putative_targets = rule_runner.request(
PutativeTargets,
[
PutativeProjectVersionTargetsRequest(
("project/dir1", "project/dir2", "project/dir3"),
),
# Declare that all these files in the project are already owned by targets.
AllOwnedSources(["project/dir2/file.txt", "project/dir3/VERSION"]),
],
)
assert (
PutativeTargets(
[
PutativeTarget(
path="project/dir1",
name="project-version-file",
type_alias="version_file",
triggering_sources=("VERSION",),
owned_sources=("VERSION",),
kwargs=FrozenDict({}),
comments=(),
)
]
)
== putative_targets
)
Unit testing for rules
Finally, if your plugin is very complex and would benefit from a more rigorous testing, you may consider writing unit tests for the rules where some parts of the rules are going to be patched with mocks. For instance, there's get_git_repo_version rule which calls Git (in a subprocess) to describe the repository status. We could mock the Process call to make sure the inline logic of the rule is correct instead.
from unittest.mock import Mock
from pants.base.build_root import BuildRoot
from pants.core.util_rules.system_binaries import (
BinaryPath,
BinaryPathRequest,
BinaryPaths,
)
from pants.engine.process import Process, ProcessResult
from pants.testutil.rule_runner import MockGet, run_rule_with_mocks
from internal_plugins.project_version.rules import GitTagVersion, get_git_repo_version
def test_get_git_version() -> None:
"""Test running a specific rule returning a GitVersion."""
def mock_binary_paths(request: BinaryPathRequest) -> BinaryPaths:
return BinaryPaths(binary_name="git", paths=[BinaryPath("/usr/bin/git")])
def mock_process_git_describe(process: Process) -> ProcessResult:
return Mock(stdout=b"10.6.1\n")
result: GitTagVersion = run_rule_with_mocks(
get_git_repo_version,
rule_args=[BuildRoot, ""],
mock_gets=[
MockGet(
output_type=BinaryPaths,
input_types=(BinaryPathRequest,),
mock=mock_binary_paths,
),
MockGet(
output_type=ProcessResult,
input_types=(Process,),
mock=mock_process_git_describe,
),
],
)
assert result == GitTagVersion("10.6.1")
You could write the helper functions returning the mock objects as lambdas, if you like, for instance:
MockGet(
output_type=BinaryPaths,
input_types=(BinaryPathRequest,),
mock=lambda request: BinaryPaths(binary_name="git", paths=[BinaryPath("/usr/bin/git")]),
),
however if you have many Get requests that are being mocked, because lambda's syntax does not support type annotations, it can make your tests slightly harder to read. For instance, in the example above, the type of the request argument is unknown.
This concludes the series of tutorials that should help you get started writing own plugins with Pants. We have by now done quite a lot of work! You have learned:
- how to create an own goal, custom options and custom targets
- how to extend existing Pants goals such as
tailor - how to run system tools in your plugins and how Pants interacts with the file system
- how to write unit and integration tests for your plugin code
You are now ready to design and implement your next Pants plugin!