Code layout

Actually, before we do that I need to make a slight correction. In the previous article I mentioned the code layout to be like this:

 dir/
    person.pl
    Person.pm

This worked and made it simple to run the script, but in most cases the directory layout of a project is more nuanced.

Normally the modules are located inside the lib/ directory of the project and the scripts live in another subdirectory which is usually called script/ or bin/ as in this example:

 dir/
    script/
      person.pl
    lib/
      Person.pm

In that case, if our working directory is still the root of the project then we can run the script with the following command:

perl -Ilib script/person.pl

We had to supply the -I parameter to include the lib/ directory in @INC, the module search path of Perl.

Adding a test

The test scripts are located in the t/ directory next to the scirpt/ and lib/ directories and the have a .t extension:

 dir/
    script/
      person.pl
    lib/
      Person.pm
    t/
      01-name.t

Because by default the test script are executed in abc order, having a leading number makes it easy to put basic tests first and more complex tests later using bigger numbers.

the t/01-name.t script looks like this:

use strict;
use warnings;
use v5.10;

use Test::More tests => 1;

use Person;

my $p = Person->new;
isa_ok($p, 'Person');

A test script is just a simple Perl script with slightly different way of working. They start with the usual statements of use strict; and use warnings. We also add use v5.10; because we are already used to that.

Then we load the Test::More module and using tests => 1; we declare how many unit-test we are going to run. See the whole testing series for more details.

In the screencast I had two tests. The first one was

use_ok('Person');

which attempted to load the module and test if it was successful. This style of testing is not recommended any more so I left it out from the example in article.

The next test was checking if the constructor created an instance of the Person class. So we called the new constructor and then use the isa_ok function provided by Test::More to check if the variable $p contains an object which is a Person-object.

We can run the test using perl:

perl -Ilib t/01-name.t

resulting in this output:

1..1
ok 1 - An object of class 'Person' isa 'Person'

or better yet we can use prove

prove -l t/

resulting in this output:

t/01-name.t .. ok   
All tests successful.
Files=1, Tests=1,  0 wallclock secs ( 0.03 usr  0.01 sys +  0.22 cusr  0.01 csys =  0.27 CPU)
Result: PASS

For perl we had to pass -Ilib to include the lib/ directory in the @INC. For prove it is enough to pass a single lower-case -l that will do the same.

In a large application we probably would not test low-level things such as the constructor being able to create an object, as I could rely on the maturity of the Moose project.