Shell Testing

Shell Testing

Decision: Bats vs Plain Assertions

• Bats for anything with >3 test cases, fixtures, or mocking needs
• Plain bash assertions for smoke tests or single-function validation
• Always use bats-core (not legacy bats) -- it supports setup_file/teardown_file, parallel execution

Bats Patterns That Matter

Mocking External Commands via PATH

Preferred over function mocking -- works across subshells and child processes:

setup() {
    STUBS_DIR="$TMPDIR/stubs"; mkdir -p "$STUBS_DIR"
    export PATH="$STUBS_DIR:$PATH"
}

create_stub() {
    local cmd="$1" output="$2" code="${3:-0}"
    printf '#!/bin/bash\necho "%s"\nexit %s\n' "$output" "$code" > "$STUBS_DIR/$cmd"
    chmod +x "$STUBS_DIR/$cmd"
}

Why: export -f mocking breaks across run boundaries and subshells. PATH stubs are reliable.

setup_file vs setup

• setup_file / teardown_file -- expensive one-time work (DB fixtures, compilation)
• setup / teardown -- per-test isolation (temp dirs, env vars)

Always create temp dirs in setup, never reuse across tests.

Multi-line Output

@test "parse multi-line" {
    run my_command
    [ "${lines[0]}" = "header" ]
    [ "${lines[2]}" = "data row" ]
}

$output is the full string; ${lines[@]} is the array. Use lines for structured output validation.

Fixture Strategy

• Copy fixtures to temp dir before mutating -- never modify originals
• Use $BATS_TEST_DIRNAME to locate fixture dir relative to test file
• For generated fixtures, create helper functions, not inline heredocs

ShellCheck Opinions

Recommended .shellcheckrc

shell=bash
enable=avoid-nullary-conditions,require-variable-braces
disable=SC1091
external-sources=true

• SC1091 (not following sourced files): almost always a false positive in projects with dynamic sourcing -- disable globally
• SC2086 (unquoted variables): never disable globally; fix each instance or suppress inline with comment explaining why
• SC2015 (&& || chains): suppress only in one-liners where intent is obvious

Suppression Rules

• Always add a comment explaining why when using # shellcheck disable=SCXXXX
• Suppress at the narrowest scope (line > function > file)
• Never disable SC2086 project-wide -- it catches real bugs

Target Shell Mismatch

Most common source of false positives. If your scripts use bash features, ensure:

• Shebang is #!/usr/bin/env bash (not #!/bin/sh)
• .shellcheckrc has shell=bash
• CI runs with --shell=bash flag

CI Integration

Preferred Setup

# GitHub Actions -- run both together
- name: Shell quality
  run: |
    shellcheck --format=gcc **/*.sh
    bats tests/*.bats --jobs 4

• Use --format=gcc in CI for parseable output
• Use --jobs N for parallel Bats execution
• Fail the build on any shellcheck warning (no --severity filtering)
• Run shellcheck before bats -- catch static issues before spending time on integration tests

Pre-commit Hook

Lint only changed files:

git diff --cached --name-only --diff-filter=d | grep '\.sh$' | xargs -r shellcheck

Non-Obvious Gotchas

• run captures both stdout and stderr in $output -- use run --separate-stderr (bats-core 1.5+) if you need to distinguish
• [ "$status" -eq 0 ] after run checks the command's exit code, not the test's
• ShellCheck --check-sourced follows source/. directives but requires files to exist at analysis time
• bats --filter "pattern" runs only matching test names -- use for focused debugging
• Parallel bats (--jobs) shares nothing between files but setup_file resources persist within a file