Can I make google test return 0 even when tests fail?

Question

I am calling a googletest in the post-build step of a C++ project in VS 2012.

Naturally, when any of the tests fail, the googletest command returns failure (-1), and the entire project is marked as a failure by Visual Studio.

I do not want that. I want the googletest to be run, and I want to see the results in the output, but I do not want to fail the project if not all tests pass.

Is there any flag that I can pass into googletest so that it always returns success (zero)?

Answer 1

Yes, you can make the test return 0 if you write your own main function.

I imagine you're linking your test executable with the special gtest_main library which is a very basic helper to allow you to avoid having to write your own main function.

It's pretty much just doing:

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  printf("Running main() from gtest_main.cc\n");
  testing::InitGoogleTest(&argc, argv);
  return RUN_ALL_TESTS();
}

The RUN_ALL_TESTS macro is the culprit which is returning -1, so all you need to do is stop linking with gtest_main and write your own main more like:

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  testing::InitGoogleTest(&argc, argv);
  RUN_ALL_TESTS();
  return 0;
}

For more info on this topic, see the GoogleTest docs.