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Cram tests: a hidden gem of dune

I'm a strong advocate of unit tests, I can confidently say that it has saved me from introducing regressions countless times. Today I want to share one of the hidden gems of OCaml and their testing story with dune, cram tests.

Cram tests, in essence, are snapshots of interactive shell sessions. They provide a versatile framework for testing OCaml projects, but not only OCaml, they can be used for any CLI.

I’m surprised why this pattern is not more common outside of (the small) world of OCaml, since they come from Python (bitheap.org/cram) and there are implementations in Go (https://github.com/mgeisler/cram) and other languages. Probably because it didn’t reach to JavaScript world (??) and they are a bit old.

Regardless, let’s dive in

Cram test file format

Those test files contain both the execution of the CLI invocations followed by the expected output either from stdout or stderr. The test runner, in this case dune, will run those invocations and diff with the expected output.

Let’s check the syntax with an example:

Here there is just a coment about this test, since there is no space at the start
it's treated as a comment.
 
	$ echo "This command runs as part of the test" > data.txt
 
We want to see the content of "data.txt"
 
  $ cat data.txt
  This command runs as part of the test
 
The command `cat data.txt` gets diffed against the next line `  This command runs as part of the test
` from this file, and that's the first beauty of cram tests.
Here there is just a coment about this test, since there is no space at the start
it's treated as a comment.
 
	$ echo "This command runs as part of the test" > data.txt
 
We want to see the content of "data.txt"
 
  $ cat data.txt
  This command runs as part of the test
 
The command `cat data.txt` gets diffed against the next line `  This command runs as part of the test
` from this file, and that's the first beauty of cram tests.

To define the syntax as rules:

  • Text and no indentation, are comments
  • Lines with a dollar sign and indentation, run in the shell
  • Lines after a shell, indentation and prefixed by > contains the expected output (either stdout or stderr)

cram test editor screenshot

This is a screenshot of my editor, showcasing the syntax highlighting and a real .t file

Dune integrates perfectly with cram tests

dune supports cram tests out of the box and integrates nicely with all your dune test workflow.

In previous versions of dune, you need to enable them manually. For dune < 3 add (cram enabled) in dune-project (might need to create a dune-project file at the root of your project if you don't have one already). If you are using dune > 3, nothing to do, they are already enabled

Your first cram test

If you want to experience the flow of it before using it in a real-world scenario, open your dune project and follow it as a tutorial.

Let’s start with the simplest possible test.

  1. Crete a file called simple.t with:
  $ echo 'lola'
  $ echo 'lola'
  1. Run the test and let it crash, either
  • run the entire “test suite” with dune runtest
  • or a specific test with their respective alias dune build @simple —watch (all cram tests are automatically dune aliases)

Output of the execution will be:

File "tests/simple.t", line 1, characters 0-0:
diff --git a/_build/.sandbox/e72f0d9cb592f23848ccd62f4a630862/tests/simple.t b/_build/.sandbox/e72f0d9cb592f23848ccd62f4a630862/tests/simple.t.corrected
index de6f8c28..ef3231ef 100644
--- a/_build/.sandbox/e72f0d9cb592f23848ccd62f4a630862/tests/simple.t
+++ b/_build/.sandbox/e72f0d9cb592f23848ccd62f4a630862/tests/simple.t.corrected
@@ -1 +1,2 @@
   $ echo 'lola'
+  lola
File "tests/simple.t", line 1, characters 0-0:
diff --git a/_build/.sandbox/e72f0d9cb592f23848ccd62f4a630862/tests/simple.t b/_build/.sandbox/e72f0d9cb592f23848ccd62f4a630862/tests/simple.t.corrected
index de6f8c28..ef3231ef 100644
--- a/_build/.sandbox/e72f0d9cb592f23848ccd62f4a630862/tests/simple.t
+++ b/_build/.sandbox/e72f0d9cb592f23848ccd62f4a630862/tests/simple.t.corrected
@@ -1 +1,2 @@
   $ echo 'lola'
+  lola
  1. Accept the result as correct, we can update the snapshot manually (a bit boring and tedious) or with promotion (https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/latest/concepts/promotion.html#promotion) (automatic).

Running dune build @simple —auto-promote which updates simple.t file for you.

To ensure everything works, try running the tests again, which in this case should pass. Run dune build @simple and the output should be empty. Empty in dune, means very good

Organise the cram suite

Directories with .t with a run.t file inside, are also valid cram tests.

Keep all your tests as .t files can get out of hand pretty quickly, since some test suites could contain hundreds of tests, and some tests might contain fixtures or any config files

Make your executable available under cram tests

You might write a perfect test, only to be greeted with [ERROR] Program "your_binary" not found!. This happens because Dune doesn't automatically know which executables should be accessible during cram test execution.

There are three ways to expose your executable to cram tests:

  • First, you can add a public_name in your executable stanza like (public_name my-app), which makes the executable available.
  • Second, you can set the executable to be part of the dune installation with an install stanza (install (section bin) (files my_bin.exe)). Do not confuse dune installation with opam installation, the dune installation offers a way to "copying freshly built artifacts from the workspace to the system", while opam installs opam packages in your opam switch (downloading from opam repositories, building from sources, etc).
  • Third, you can directly specify the executable as a dependency in your cram test (deps %{exe:../bin/my_bin.exe}). More info in about the cram stanza in the dune documentation

If you're not sure which to choose, I recommend starting with setting a public_name in your executable stanza. It's the most explicit approach and if you are working on a CLI, you will still need a public_name to expose it on the opam package.

What makes a good (cram) test?

Writing effective cram tests requires more than just copying command output, let's see some key principles that will help you write robust and maintainable snapshot tests

Keep tests hermetic

Your tests should be hermetic - meaning they're self-contained and don't depend on external state. Each test should clean up after itself and running it multiple times should produce the same result. For example:

  $ mkdir -p tmp
  $ cd tmp
  $ echo "hello" > test.txt
  $ cat test.txt
  hello
  $ cd ..
  $ rm -rf tmp
  $ mkdir -p tmp
  $ cd tmp
  $ echo "hello" > test.txt
  $ cat test.txt
  hello
  $ cd ..
  $ rm -rf tmp

Use relative paths and environment variables

One common pitfall is hardcoding absolute paths in your tests. This makes tests brittle and non-portable. Dune provides several environment variables to help write path-independent tests:

  # DON'T do this
  $ cat /home/user/project/test.txt
 
  # DO this instead
  $ cat $DUNE_ROOT/test.txt
  # DON'T do this
  $ cat /home/user/project/test.txt
 
  # DO this instead
  $ cat $DUNE_ROOT/test.txt

Some useful environment variables include:

  • $DUNE_ROOT: Points to your project root
  • $INSIDE_DUNE: Set when running inside dune's test suite
  • $PWD: Current working directory
  • $DUNE_BUILD_DIR: Path to dune's build directory

Here's a more complete example showing these variables in action:

  $ echo $DUNE_ROOT | grep -o '[^/]*$'
  my-project
 
  # Create a file relative to project root
  $ cat > $DUNE_ROOT/input.ml <<EOF
  > let greeting = "Hello, World!"
  > let () = print_endline greeting
  > EOF
 
  # Test the compiled output
  $ dune exec ./bin/main.exe
  Hello, World!
  $ echo $DUNE_ROOT | grep -o '[^/]*$'
  my-project
 
  # Create a file relative to project root
  $ cat > $DUNE_ROOT/input.ml <<EOF
  > let greeting = "Hello, World!"
  > let () = print_endline greeting
  > EOF
 
  # Test the compiled output
  $ dune exec ./bin/main.exe
  Hello, World!

This approach ensures your tests will run consistently across different environments and developer machines. It's especially important if you plan to run these tests in CI or in other developer local envs.

Self documenting

A good cram test should explain its purpose and any non-obvious setup, making it easier for others (or yourself in 6 months) to understand what's being tested and why. The comments should focus on the intent behind the test, not just describe the commands being run.

They are used in the wild

The true testament to cram tests' effectiveness is their adoption by prominent projects in the OCaml ecosystem.

Dune itself, uses cram tests extensively throughout its codebase - with over 800 tests covering everything from basic builds to complex workspace configurations. They also used cram tests for bug reporting. When users encounter issues, they're encouraged to submit a minimal reproduction case as a cram test. This practice has been so successful that many bug reports in their issue tracker include a .t file demonstrating the problem.

Melange is another great other example of it, where ensures the JavaScript compilation to remain consistent with blackbox tests https://github.com/melange-re/melange/tree/main/test/blackbox-tests.

As a useful reference, there’s some of my work migrating to cram tests in here:

Ending words

TLDR: cram tests are nice, actually.

Thanks for reaching the end. Let me know if you have any feedback, corrections or questions. Always happy to chat about any topic mentioned in this post, feel free to reach out.