BDD-style fluent testing in BASH

I wanted to impress on my colleagues that BASH was still hip, still relevant. And that I wasn't an old hacker. So I wrote a small BDD test framework for BASH.

Techniques

Fluent coding relies on several BASH features:

• Variable expansion happens before executing commands
• A shell function is indistinguishable from a program: they are called the same way
• Local function variables are dynamically scoped but only within a function, so are visible to other functions called within that scope, directly or indirectly through further function calls

Together with Builder pattern, it's easy to write given/when/then tests. (Builder pattern here solves the problem not of telescoping constructors, but massive, arbitrary argument lists.)

So when you run:

function c {
    echo "$message"
}

function b {
    "$@"
}

function a {
    local message="$1"
    shift
    "$@"
}

a "Bob's your uncle" b c

You see the output:

Bob's your uncle

How does this work?

First BASH expands variables. In function a this means that after the first argument is remembered and removed from the argument list, "$@" expands to b c. Then b c is executed.

Then BASH calls the function b with argument "c". Similarly b expands "$@" to c and calls it.

Finally as $message is visible in functions called by a, c prints the first argument passed to a (as it was remebered in the variable $message), or "Bob's your uncle" in this example.

Running the snippet with xtrace makes this clear (assuming the snippet is saved in a file named example):

bash -x example
+ a 'Bob'\''s your uncle' b c
+ local 'message=Bob'\''s your uncle'
+ shift
+ b c
+ c
+ echo 'Bob'\''s your uncle'
Bob's your uncle

So the test functions for given_jar, when_run and then_expect (along with other, similar functions) work the same way. Keep this in mind.

Application

So how does this buy me fluent BDD?

Given these functions:

function then_expect {
    local expectation="$1"
    shift

    if [[ some_test "$pre_condition" "$condition" "$expectation" ]]
    then
        echo "PASS: $scenario"
        return 0
    else
        echo "FAIL: $scenario"
        return 1
    fi
}

function when {
    local condition="$1"
    shift
    "$@"
}

function given {
    local pre_condition="$1"
    shift
    "$@"
}

function scenario {
    local scenario="$1"
    shift
    "$@"
}

When you write:

scenario "Some test case" \
    given "Something always true" \
    when "Something you want to test" \
    then_expect "Some outcome"

Then it executes:

some_test "Something always true" "Something you want to test" "Some outcome"

And prints one of:

PASS Some test case
FAIL Some test case

A real example at https://github.com/binkley/shell/tree/master/testing-bash.