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  • Apr 28, 2018
  • Post Nº 52

Testing Haskell

This post explains how to configure your Haskell project for testing, using Cabal and Travis CI.

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This post explains how to configure your Haskell project for testing, using Cabal and Travis CI.

I’d like to learn Haskell, but I had a really hard time yesterday to setup the testing environment correctly. So I want to share my experience with you, to make life easier. In this post, we’ll go through the following steps:

  • Adapt project structure to Cabal
  • Configure test
  • Enable Travis CI

Adapt Project Structure to Cabal

Cabal is a system for building and packaging Haskell libraries and programs. Before this blog post, I didn’t know about Cabal and my project have only 2 Haskell files on the top level folder. You can initialize the Cabal structure and generate related files using interactive command line tool cabal init. Once done, editing the <project>.cabal file to add or modify the content.

Then you need to move the Haskell source files *.hs into the src folder.

$ find src -type f
src/factorial.hs
src/Mathematics.hs
src/catalan.hs

If everything works, try configuring and building the package:

$ cabal configure
$ cabal build

Install if it works:

$ cabal install

Configure Tests

For the testing part, I followed Cabal’s documentation: §3.3.2.6 Test suites. It’s very simple, just declare an additional section in your project’s <project>.cabal, as test-suite. (Note: replace test-suite by test won’t work):

test-suite Mathematics
  type:                exitcode-stdio-1.0
  main-is:             test-mathematics.hs
  hs-source-dirs:      src, test
  build-depends:       base
  other-modules:       Mathematics
  default-language:    Haskell2010

In the above section, multiple fields have been declared:

  • The type field indicates the type of test-suite is exitcode-stdio-1.0. It means test suite can indicate test failure with a non-zero exit code when run. It may also provide human-readable log information through the standard output and error channels. The exitcode-stdio-1.0 type requires the main-is field.
  • The main-is field indicates the main program to run.
  • The hs-source-dirs field indicates the haskell source directories are src and test.
  • The build-depends field indicates the dependencies when building this module.
  • The other-modules field indicates a list of modules used by the component but not exposed to users.
  • The default-language field indicates the default language version. It should be aligned with the Library section.

Note: you must run cabal install --enable-tests, then you can run cabal test to run your tests.

Travis CI

Travis CI has a complet documentation page about Building a Haskell Project. In my case, I need to precise the language as Haskell, since Travis CI didn’t detect it correctly (without precision, it used Java and Gradle mistakenly). And I also flatten GHC versions list into oneline. Here’s the result:

language: haskell
ghc: 8.2

References

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