Tuesday Coding Tip 10— CTest

Question

Tuesday coding tips are super short posts about various tidbits mainly from C++, but also from other programming languages I use. You can also follow the #TuesdayCodingTips hashtag on Mastodon and Linkedin.

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CMake can do many things and instrumenting your test suite is one of them. Use add_test to tell cmake it should run a particular command with given parameters. If it returns zero, it succeeded. You can use it to simply run a testrunner binary or to make a matrix of input parameters that are expected to not crash the program.

cmake_minimum_required ( VERSION 3.26 )

project ( testrunner )
add_executable ( ${PROJECT_NAME} Main.cpp )

enable_testing()
add_test(
   NAME "Example with no params"
   COMMAND ${PROJECT_NAME}
)

add_test(
   NAME "Example with help param"
   COMMAND ${PROJECT_NAME} -h
)

In order to add_test do anything, one has to also call enable_testing(). Running the tests is just a matter of running ctest from command line. Just note that ctest requires you to specify a build configuration if you have more than one.