autotest-cpp

Sample project for clang + gtest + cmake + autotest

Intro

This is my first attempt to create a C++ development environment. I use a Mac, and I want to learn C++11, and so will be using clang. Also, all the cool kids seem to love cmake, so I'll try that too. Also, I want automated unit testing, and am trying googletest (gtest). Finally, I want a rapid test cycle, and therefore created a simple autotest script which runs the gtest unit tests every time I write a source file from the editor.

All the research work for this sample project is embodied in the shell scripts. I tried to make them as simple as possible for ease of leveraging my research.

Dependencies

Requires fswatch which I got on my Mac using homebrew ("brew install fswatch").

Requires cmake which I got on my Mac by downloading the .dmg file and doing the standard install. When I did it, the syn links didn't install in /usr/bin, so I did:

sudo /Applications/cmake.app/Contents/bin/cmake-gui

to start the cmake app. Then I pulled down "Tools" and selected "Install For Command Line Use", etc.

Requires gtest, a snapshot of which is included in this sample project. Why? Because I couldn't get it working externally with cmake, and StackOverflow gave me the tip.

Files

The main files in this sample are:

• learn.cpp - the unit tests (in gtest form).
• clean.sh - script to remove all generated files.
• rebuild.sh - script to run cmake to re-configure and re-generate the Makefile, re-build gtest, and re-build learn.cpp.
• tst.sh - script to run make followed by the unit tests executable.
• autotest.sh - script to monitor for updated source files and run tst.sh.
• CMakeLists.txt - master file for cmake.
• gtest-1.7.0.tz - compressed tar snapshot of gtest.

Usage

After downloading, get started with:

./rebuild.sh

You'll need to re-run rebuild.sh when you make changes to your project that require re-generating the Makefile. For exmaple, adding or removing a file, or making other changes to CMakeLists.txt.

Now you can run the automated tester in one window with:

./autotest.sh

while you edit source files in another window. Each time you save a source file, the autotest window should wake up, do a "make", and if successful, will do a ./tst.sh.

Subsequent to that, you can manually do a "minor" rebuild with:

make

By minor, I mean after you've made changes which do not require re-generating the Makefile. HOWEVER, if you add/remove files, or otherwise need to change the cmake list file, you'll have to run rebuild.sh again.

You can manually run the unit tests with:

./runUnitTests

You can combine make and ./runUnitTests with:

./tst.sh

TODO

One significant problem is that if a number of files are changed, autotest will loop that many times. It will be better if, when the first file change is detected, it waits a half second and reads the rest of the files from fswatch. But I can't think of an easy way to do that without a C program doing non-blocking reads, which sounds too much like work. Oh well, I'll get motivated to figure it out when I start being inconvenienced by the problem. :-)