Unit tests

Meson comes with a fully functional unit test system. To use it simply build an executable and then use it in a test.

e = executable('prog', 'testprog.c')
test('name of test', e)

You can add as many tests as you want. They are run with the command meson test.

Meson captures the output of all tests and writes it in the log file meson-logs/testlog.txt.

Test parameters

Some tests require the use of command line arguments or environment variables. These are simple to define.

test('command line test', exe, args : ['first', 'second'])
test('envvar test', exe2, env : ['key1=value1', 'key2=value2'])

Note how you need to specify multiple values as an array.

MALLOC_PERTURB_

By default, environment variable MALLOC_PERTURB_ is set to a random value between 1..255. This can help find memory leaks on configurations using glibc, including with non-GCC compilers. This feature can be disabled as discussed in test().

ASAN_OPTIONS, UBSAN_OPTIONS, and MSAN_OPTIONS

By default, the environment variables ASAN_OPTIONS, UBSAN_OPTIONS, and MSAN_OPTIONS are set to enable aborting on detected violations and to give a backtrace. This feature can be disabled as discussed in test().

Coverage

If you enable coverage measurements by giving Meson the command line flag -Db_coverage=true, you can generate coverage reports after running the tests (running the tests is required to gather the list of functions that get called). Meson will autodetect what coverage generator tools you have installed and will generate the corresponding targets. These targets are coverage-xml and coverage-text which are both provided by Gcovr (version 3.3 or higher) coverage-sonarqube which is provided by Gcovr (version 4.2 or higher) and coverage-html, which requires lcov and GenHTML or Gcovr. As a convenience, a high-level coverage target is also generated which will produce all 3 coverage report types, if possible.

The output of these commands is written to the log directory meson-logs in your build directory.

Parallelism

To reduce test times, Meson will by default run multiple unit tests in parallel. It is common to have some tests which cannot be run in parallel because they require unique hold on some resource such as a file or a D-Bus name. You have to specify these tests with a keyword argument.

test('unique test', t, is_parallel : false)

Meson will then make sure that no other unit test is running at the same time. Non-parallel tests take longer to run so it is recommended that you write your unit tests to be parallel executable whenever possible.

By default Meson uses as many concurrent processes as there are cores on the test machine. You can override this with the environment variable MESON_TESTTHREADS or, since 1.7.0, MESON_NUM_PROCESSES:

$ MESON_NUM_PROCESSES=5 meson test

Setting MESON_NUM_PROCESSES to 0 enables the default behavior (core count), whereas setting an invalid value results in setting the job count to 1.

If both environment variables are present, MESON_NUM_PROCESSES prevails.

Priorities

(added in version 0.52.0)

Tests can be assigned a priority that determines when a test is started. Tests with higher priority are started first, tests with lower priority started later. The default priority is 0, Meson makes no guarantee on the ordering of tests with identical priority.

test('started second', t, priority : 0)
test('started third', t, priority : -50)
test('started first', t, priority : 1000)

Note that the test priority only affects the starting order of tests and subsequent tests are affected by how long it takes previous tests to complete. It is thus possible that a higher-priority test is still running when lower-priority tests with a shorter runtime have completed.

Skipped tests and hard errors

Sometimes a test can only determine at runtime that it cannot be run.

For the default exitcode testing protocol, the GNU standard approach in this case is to exit the program with error code 77. Meson will detect this and report these tests as skipped rather than failed. This behavior was added in version 0.37.0.

For TAP-based tests, skipped tests should print a single line starting with 1..0 # SKIP.

In addition, sometimes a test fails set up so that it should fail even if it is marked as an expected failure. The GNU standard approach in this case is to exit the program with error code 99. Again, Meson will detect this and report these tests as ERROR, ignoring the setting of should_fail. This behavior was added in version 0.50.0.

Testing tool

The goal of the Meson test tool is to provide a simple way to run tests in a variety of different ways. The tool is designed to be run in the build directory.

The simplest thing to do is just to run all tests.

$ meson test

Run subsets of tests

For clarity, consider the meson.build containing:

test('A', ..., suite: 'foo')
test('B', ..., suite: ['foo', 'bar'])
test('C', ..., suite: 'bar')
test('D', ..., suite: 'baz')

Specify test(s) by name like:

$ meson test A D

You can run tests from specific (sub)project:

$ meson test (sub)project_name:

or a specific test in a specific project:

$ meson test (sub)project_name:test_name

Since version 1.2.0, you can use wildcards in project and test names. For instance, to run all tests beginning with "foo" and all tests from projects beginning with "bar":

$ meson test "foo*" "bar*:"

Tests belonging to a suite suite can be run as follows

$ meson test --suite (sub)project_name:suite

Since version 0.46, (sub)project_name can be omitted if it is the top-level project.

Multiple suites are specified like:

$ meson test --suite foo --suite bar

NOTE: If you choose to specify both suite(s) and specific test name(s), the test name(s) must be contained in the suite(s). This however is redundant-- it would be more useful to specify either specific test names or suite(s).

Other test options

Sometimes you need to run the tests multiple times, which is done like this:

$ meson test --repeat=10

Meson will set the MESON_TEST_ITERATION environment variable to the current iteration of the test (added 1.5.0).

Invoking tests via a helper executable such as Valgrind can be done with the --wrap argument

$ meson test --wrap=valgrind testname

Arguments to the wrapper binary can be given like this:

$ meson test --wrap='valgrind --tool=helgrind' testname

Meson also supports running the tests under GDB. Just doing this:

$ meson test --gdb testname

Meson will launch gdb all set up to run the test. Just type run in the GDB command prompt to start the program.

The second use case is a test that segfaults only rarely. In this case you can invoke the following command:

$ meson test --gdb --repeat=10000 testname

This runs the test up to 10 000 times under GDB automatically. If the program crashes, GDB will halt and the user can debug the application. Note that testing timeouts are disabled in this case so meson test will not kill gdb while the developer is still debugging it. The downside is that if the test binary freezes, the test runner will wait forever.

Sometimes, the GDB binary is not in the PATH variable or the user wants to use a GDB replacement. Therefore, the invoked GDB program can be specified (added 0.52.0):

$ meson test --gdb --gdb-path /path/to/gdb testname

$ meson test --print-errorlogs

Running tests interactively can be done with the --interactive option. meson test --interactive invokes tests with stdout, stdin and stderr connected directly to the calling terminal. This can be useful if your test is an integration test running in a container or virtual machine where a debug shell is spawned if it fails (added 1.5.0):

$ meson test --interactive testname

Meson will report the output produced by the failing tests along with other useful information as the environmental variables. This is useful, for example, when you run the tests on Travis-CI, Jenkins and the like.

By default, the output from tests will be limited to the last 100 lines. The maximum number of lines to show can be configured with the --max-lines option (added 1.5.0):

$ meson test --max-lines=1000 testname

Timeout

In the test case options, the timeout option is specified in a number of seconds.

To disable timeout in test cases, add timeout: 0 or a negative value to allow infinite duration for the test case to complete.

For running tests, you can specify a command line argument for overriding the timeout as well:

$ meson test --timeout-multiplier 0

For further information see the command line help of Meson by running meson test -h.

Legacy notes

If meson test does not work for you, you likely have a old version of Meson. In that case you should call mesontest instead. If mesontest doesn't work either you have a very old version prior to 0.37.0 and should upgrade.

Test outputs

Meson will write several different files with detailed results of running tests. These will be written into $builddir/meson-logs/

testlog.json

This is not a proper json file, but a file containing one valid json object per line. This is file is designed so each line is streamed out as each test is run, so it can be read as a stream while the test harness is running

testlog.junit.xml

This is a valid JUnit XML description of all tests run. It is not streamed out, and is written only once all tests complete running.

When tests use the tap protocol each test will be recorded as a testsuite container, with each case named by the number of the result.

When tests use the gtest protocol Meson will inject arguments to the test to generate its own JUnit XML, which Meson will include as part of this XML file.

New in 0.55.0