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So, to test these functions that would normally have side-effects or would require a lot of extra work setting up to work correctly, we basically have to replace the existing functions. Normally in a running program you really wouldn���t want to do this, save for when you have dynamic scope, which I haven���t yet found in Lua.

So I want to test that everything works properly when the io.access function reports it can���t access a certain file, I���d change the function like so:

-- You must first require it, so you have the same module.
local posix = require 'posix'

-- ...

posix.access = function ()
   return false
end

This way I know what the function will do, when it eventually gets called.

After finally getting some tests in my project and making sure that I have full test coverage of my module, I thought it would be fun to see if I could automatically test everything with travis-ci. It was a little challenging because I don���t normally run Ubuntu or Debian, so I don���t know what they name their packages, and one of my dependencies (luasec) had some trouble finding the libssl library.

After a little poking around, a few retries and a false-success, it���s now finally running:

My .travis.yml is pretty simple:

language: erlang

env:
  - LUA="lua"

branches:
  except:
    - gh-pages

install:
  - sudo apt-get update
  - sudo apt-get install luarocks libssl1.0.0
  - sudo luarocks install busted
  - sudo luarocks install luasocket
  - sudo luarocks install luasec OPENSSL_LIBDIR=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
  - sudo luarocks install luajson
  - sudo luarocks install luaposix

script: "busted -m 'lua/?.lua' -o TAP"

# ...

I���m using the erlang environment, because there isn���t a Lua one (yet). I���ve written my library for lua, not luajit, so busted needs to know which to run, it always runs luajit first it seems. I don���t need the tests to be run again when the gh-pages branch is updated, since that has nothing to do with the code itself, I would actually like to have tests run on all other branches.

Then we get to the dependencies. Nothing major except for the luasec dependency. I���m not entirely sure how long that OPENSSL_LIBDIR will remain where it is now, but it works for now. I didn���t discover the location myself, I found it on someone else���s .travis.yml as a comment.

Lastly we have the script. Since the tests live in /spec and the code lives in /lua I run the tests from the project root and include the lua directory in the module path. I use TAP output because with the default output failures also return 0, when a failure occurs with the TAP output, a non-0 exit status is returned and travis knows they didn���t pass. That is why build 6 passed even though there was still a failed test.

The rest is notification settings which isn���t interesting enough to duplicate here.

Now I should start expanding it a little. Well, actually I still need to add the proper license information.