Testing a Perl Script

(Up-to-date source of this post.)

At $work, I was to upgrade several Debians from Squeezy through Wheezy to Jessie (6 to 8). I wanted to be sure that after the upgrade (mostly) the same processes are running as before. I whipped up a script, that simply stores the list of running processes before the upgrade. When run subsequently it reports missing processes (if any).

To make the script reliable and easy to maintain I wanted to test it somehow. To do that I turned the script into a modulino following brian d foy's advice in chapter 17 of Mastering Perl. The trick was to put all the code into subroutines that can be tested and using the caller() function to decide whether the script is used as a script or as a module. The script looks something like this now:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;
use autodie;
use Getopt::Long;
use Pod::Usage;
use Storable qw(freeze thaw);

GetOptions(
    "h|?|help"  => \my $help,
    "l|print"   => \my $print,
    "v|verbose" => \my $verbose,
    "n|net"     => \my $net,
) or pod2usage(1);
pod2usage( -exitval => 0, -verbose => 2, -noperldoc => 1 ) if $help;

run() unless caller();

sub run {
    # code
}

sub missing_procs {
    # code
}

sub get_procs {
    # code
}

After this modification I created a symlink

ln -s checkprocs checkprocs.pm 

and wrote a couple of tests in checkprocs.t

use strict;
use warnings;
use Test::More tests => 3;

use_ok('checkprocs');

#<<<
my $old = [(
    'proc1',
    '/path/to/proc2',
    'proc3',
    'proc4 --with-arg',
    '/path/to/proc5 -w',
)];
my $new = [(
    'proc1',
    'proc3',
    '/path/to/proc5'
)];
#>>>

{
    my @missing_procs = main::missing_procs( $old, $new );
    is(
        "@missing_procs",
        '/path/to/proc2 proc4',
        'Found missing process w/o args'
    );
}

{
    my @missing_procs = main::missing_procs( $old, $new, { verbose => 1 } );
    is(
        "@missing_procs",
        '/path/to/proc2 proc4 --with-arg',
        'Found missing process w/ args'
    );
}

Since I need to run the script under different Perl versions (Squeeze had 5.10.1, Wheezy 5.15.2 and Jessie 5.20.2) I used perlbrew to test it:

$ perlbrew exec prove checkprocs.t
perl-5.10.1
==========
checkprocs.t .. ok
All tests successful.
Files=1, Tests=3,  0 wallclock secs ( 0.01 usr  0.00 sys +  0.04 cusr  0.00 csys =  0.05 CPU)
Result: PASS

perl-5.14.2
==========
checkprocs.t .. ok
All tests successful.
Files=1, Tests=3,  0 wallclock secs ( 0.01 usr  0.00 sys +  0.04 cusr  0.00 csys =  0.05 CPU)
Result: PASS

perl-5.20.2
==========
checkprocs.t .. ok
All tests successful.
Files=1, Tests=3,  0 wallclock secs ( 0.01 usr  0.00 sys +  0.03 cusr  0.00 csys =  0.04 CPU)
Result: PASS