Testing Across Applications with EUnit

I am currently developing a distributed system for my Bachelor Thesis which utilizes a node controller application to distribute calculations from a client application towards node applications. For testing I wanted to use EUnit, mostly because that’s what I already knew and writing Unit Tests for my data module was easy and straightforward.

When it came to testing how the applications played together however I ran into a wall. For a project of this size it did not really make sense to specify a new ‘collecting’ application, which would list the others as dependency and write my tests like that. Also i wanted to keep my simple project structure (‘proj_name/node_controller’, …) which then containes the Erlang OTP applications.

The solution I came up with for now is an escript that forces a compile via mode(compile).. The other thing I added was compile([nowarn_unused_function]). because the compiler will complain about the unexported functions. The main function then simply calls eunit:test(?MODULE). to execute all specified tests. Combined with a Makefile that ensures the ‘subprojects’ are freshly compiled I can now easily write my test cases.

#!/usr/bin/env escript

-module(dist_calc_tests).
-compile([nowarn_unused_function]).
-mode(compile).
-include_lib("eunit/include/eunit.hrl").

main(_Args) ->
    eunit:test(?MODULE).

basic_node_controller_test_() ->
    {foreach, 
        fun startup_basic/0,
        fun shutdown_basic/1,
        [
            fun test_basic/1
        ]}.

startup_someapps([]) ->
    self();
startup_someapps([{PathToApp, AppName}|OtherApps]) ->
    {ok, CurrentCwd} = file:get_cwd(),
    ok = file:set_cwd(PathToApp ++ "/ebin"),
    ok = application:load(AppName),
    ok = application:start(AppName),
    ok = file:set_cwd(CurrentCwd),
    startup_someapps(OtherApps).

shutdown_someapps([]) ->
    ok;
shutdown_someapps([AppName|OtherApps]) ->
    ok = application:stop(AppName),
    ok = application:unload(AppName),
    shutdown_someapps(OtherApps).

startup_basic() ->
    startup_someapps(
        [
            {"./node", node},
            {"./node_controller", node_controller},
            {"./client", client}
        ]).

shutdown_basic(_Pid) ->
    shutdown_someapps([client, node, node_controller]).

test_basic(_Pid) ->
    timer:sleep(1000),
    [
        ?_assertMatch(
            [
                {"127.0.0.1:13832", {
                        node_controller_node,
                        "127.0.0.1",
                        13832,
                        _OpSet,
                        _Timer,
                        online,
                        0
                }}
            ], node_controller_data_node:get_nodes()),
        ?_assertEqual(
            "login_success",
            client_app:login("alice","12345"))        
    ].

Please keep in mind this is only intended for very basic protocol testing, i.e. if i break something during refactoring or similar activities. In the future I will probably modify the startup functions so that I can also easily test out different env settings for more advanced scenarios.