Course of Raku / Advanced / Testing and documentation 🆕 / Testing 🆕

Running tests

A single test file is just a Raku program, so you can run it directly:

raku t/01-basic.rakutest

It prints its TAP output to the screen. For more than a file or two, you want a test runner that runs a whole directory of tests and summarises the results. Raku’s runner is prove6:

prove6 t/

This runs every test file under t/ and reports how many files and tests passed, with a single overall pass/fail at the end — far easier to read than the raw TAP from each file.

When a distribution has a META6.json, the module tool runs its tests for you:

zef test .

zef test finds the t/ directory, runs the suite, and reports the result — which is exactly what happens automatically before a distribution is installed. So tests serve double duty: you run them while developing with prove6, and the ecosystem runs them to verify a distribution before anyone installs it.

Test files are named with a .rakutest (or .t) extension and conventionally numbered, as in t/01-basic.rakutest.

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