Megatest is a test-unit like framework with a focus on usability, and designed with continuous integration in mind.

Install the gem and add it to the application's Gemfile by executing:

$ bundle add megatest

By default, tests are assumed to live in the test directory. If present, the optional files test/test_config.rb and test/test_helper.rb are loaded automatically, and in that order.

The megatest CLI offers options to override default settings, but if you'd like to have some always set, please do so in the optional test/test_config.rb:

# test/test_config.rb

Megatest.config do |config|
  # See Megatest::Config.
end

The optional file test/test_helper.rb is meant to centralize dependencies and define test helpers:

# test/test_helper.rb

require "some_dependency"

module MyApp
  class Test < Megatest::Test
    def some_helper(arg)
    end
  end
end

Test suites are Ruby classes that inherit from Megatest::Test.

Test cases are defined with the test macro, or for compatibility with existing test suites, by defining a method starting with test_.

All the classic test-unit and minitest assertion methods are available:

# test/some_test.rb

class SomeTest < MyApp::Test
  setup do
    @user = User.new("George")
  end

  test "the truth" do
    assert_equal true, Some.truth
  end

  def test_it_works
    assert_predicate 2, :even?
  end
end

Megatest also allows to define tests inside context blocks, to make it easier to group related tests together and have them share a common name prefix.

class SomeTest < MyApp::Test
  context "when on earth" do
    test "1 is odd" do
      App.location = "earth"
      assert_predicate 1, :odd?
    end

    test "2 is even" do
      App.location = "earth"
      assert_predicate 2, :even?
    end
  end
end

Note however that context blocks aren't test suites, they don't have their own setup or teardown blocks, nor their own namespaces.

Contrary to many alternatives, megatest provides a convenient CLI interface to easily run specific tests.

Run all tests in a directory:

$ megatest # Run all tests in `test/`
$ megatest test/integration

Runs tests using 8 processes:

$ megatest -j 8

Run a test at the specific line:

$ megatest test/some_test.rb:42 test/other_test.rb:24

Run all tests matching a pattern:

$ megatest test/some_test.rb:/matching

For more detailed usage, run megatest --help.

Megatest offers multiple features to allow running test suites in parallel across many CI jobs.

The simplest way is sharding. Each worker will run its share of the test cases.

Many CI systems provide a way to run the same command on multiple nodes, and will generally expose environment variables to help split the workload.

- label: "Run Unit Tests"
  run: megatest --workers-count $CI_NODE_INDEX --worker-id $CI_NODE_TOTAL
  parallel: 8

Note that Megatest makes no effort at balancing the shards as it has no information about how long each individual test case is expected to take. However it does shard test cases individually, so it avoids the most common issue which is very large test suites containing lots of slow test cases being sharded as one unit.

If you are using CircleCI, Buildkite or HerokuCI, the workers count and worker id will be automatically inferred from the environment.

A more efficient way to parallelize tests on CI is to use a Redis server to act as a queue.

This allows to efficiently and dynamically ensure a near perfect test case balance across all the workers. And if for some reason one of the workers is lost or crashes, no test is lost, which for builds with hundreds of parallel jobs, is essential for stability.

- label: "Run Unit Tests"
  run: megatest --queue redis://redis-ci.example.com --build-id $CI_BUILD_ID --worker-id $CI_JOB_ID
  parallel: 128
  soft_fail: true # Doesn't matter if they fail or crash, only the "Results" job status matters

- label: "Unit Test Results"
  run: megatest report --queue redis://redis-ci.example.com --build-id $CI_BUILD_ID

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/byroot/megatest.