NAME
forkprove - forking prove
SYNOPSIS
forkprove -MMoose -MCatalyst -MDBIx::Class -j8 -lr tDESCRIPTION
forkprove is a forking version of prove that allows you to preload modules with -M and then run each test after forking, potentially makes most of the tests to run faster without an overhead of loading the same modules again and again, while having an isolated, clean testing environment with a fork.
It works well with parallel testing as well, combined with -j option.
CONFIGURATION
You can specify an environment variable PERL_FORKPROVE_IGNORE to contain a regular expression to ignore files to test with forkprove.
PERL_FORKPROVE_IGNORE=no-preload forkprove -lr tThis will run the tests with /no-preload/ in its filenames and directory and run with the standard perl execution via prove.
CAVEATS
Test::More
Do not try to preload Test::Builder and friends because doing so will not output clean TAP.
Known patterns to fail
Following kind of tests are known to fail.
Tests that rely on the value of
$FindBin::Bin. There's a workaround in forkprove to correct the value, but if your test relies on the timing of initialization of FindBin, it might fail.Tests that expects
ENDblock to run after each.t
WHY
Test::Aggregate allows you to create a nested TAP output by running a whole bunch of .t files from a directory.
forkprove shares the basic idea, but it creates a whole new test environment by making a copy of the process with fork for each test, which means it could run your tests that rely on the singleton state etc. without modifying the code to run with Test::Aggregate.
PERFORMANCE
Your mileage might vary, if forkprove runs your tests faster or not. For lightweight modules, we've found that using forkprove doesn't make any siginificant difference, due to the fact that fork overhead nullifies the benefit of preloading modules.
On the other hand, test suite with Moose, Catalyst and Dist::Zilla seems to run 80-100% faster with forkprove and -jN option.
AUTHOR
Tatsuhiko Miyagawa