The Yancy CMS for the Mojolicious web framework currently supports three different database systems directly (and even more through the DBIx::Class ORM). As a result, when doing development, I need to have two database daemons running locally, a bunch of different environment variables to tell the tests where those databases are, and a web daemon to test the front-end.

Setting up these daemons is a pain, but I also do not want to run them all the time (to save on my laptop's battery). To me, it's easier to run a database daemon for a specific project than to try to manage all the databases I might need. But that means that every time I want to do some work on Yancy, I need to start up a bunch of things.

Since I do all my development in a terminal window, the Tmux terminal multiplexer has become an extremely useful tool. Using a shell script and Tmux, I can run a single command to set up all the databases, environment variables, and all the tabs I need to get to work quickly.

Continue reading Testing Environment With Tmux...

Authors of Dancer (and other) PSGI applications are probably accustomed to testing with Plack::Test, and while that is a venerated option, it is pretty bare-bones.

During advent last year, I wrote about Test::Mojo, showing the many easy and (dare I say) fun ways that you can use it to test your Mojolicious applications. If you missed it, go check it out.

I expect there are at least a few of you out there who read that and think, "I'd love to use that, but I don't use Mojolicious!"; well, you're in luck! With just a little role to bridge the gap, you can use Test::Mojo to test your PSGI applications too!

Continue reading Day 20: Testing Dancer...

Test::Mojo, the Mojolicious testing tool, has a lot of ways to test routes in web applications (even for testing in other web frameworks).

But what if what I need to test isn't a route? What if it's a hook, a plugin, or a helper? We can test all those things, too!

Continue reading Day 4: Testing Hooks and Helpers...

Back on Day 9 we discussed testing and especially Test::Mojo. Today I want to just briefly talk about some practical things that can come up when testing real world applications. Once again the discussion will be motivated by the Wishlist application that we've been developing these past few days.

Continue reading Day 20: Practical Testing...

Ok so it is a bit of a click-bait headline. But that doesn't mean I don't believe it.

Test::Mojo is a test framework for websites and related technologies. While its true that there are many such tools, this one gets its power comes from combining so many of the tools that Mojolicious provides. A full non-blocking web server, including websockets, an event loop, an XML/HTML DOM parser, JSON parser and emitter, and more all come together to make incredibly detailed testing simple. Further, with the recent additions in support of roles (which will be discussed in a future post), Test::Mojo is becoming an extensible testing platform.

In this article, I'll give a quick overview of how to use Test::Mojo and some of its methods. Rest assured you'll see more of it as the series continues.

Continue reading Day 9: The Best Way to Test...