What is the preferred unit testing framework for Perl?

Question

I'm sort of new to Perl and I'm wondering if there a prefered unit testing framework?

Google is showing me some nice results, but since I'm new to this, I don't know if there is a clear preference within the community.

Answer 1

Perl has a MASSIVE set of great testing tools that come with it! The Perl core has several tens of thousands of automated checks for it, and for the most part they all use use these standard Perl frameworks. They're all tied together using TAP - the Test Anything Protocol.

The standard way of creating TAP tests in Perl is using the Test::More family of packages, including Test::Simple for getting started. Here's a quick example:

use 5.012; use warnings;  use Test::More tests => 3;  my $foo = 5; my $bar = 6;  ok $foo == 5, 'Foo was assigned 5.'; ok $bar == 6, 'Bar was assigned 6.'; ok $foo + $bar == 11, 'Addition works correctly.'; 

And the output would be:

ok 1 - Foo was assigned 5. ok 2 - Bar was assigned 6. ok 3 - Addition works correctly. 

Essentially, to get started, all you need to do is put pass a boolean value and a string explaining what should occur!

Once you get past that step, Test::More has a large number of other functions to make testing other things easier (string, regex compares, deep structure compares) and there's the Test::Harness back end that will let you test large groups of individual test scripts together.

On top of that, as Schwern pointed out, almost all of the modern Test:: modules work together. That means you can use Test::Class (as pointed out by Markus) with all of the great modules listed in rjh's answer. In fact, because Test::Builder--the tool that Test::More and others are built on (and currently maintained by Schwern...thanks Schwern!)--you can, if needed, build your OWN test subroutines from the ground up that will work with all the other test frameworks. That alone makes Perl's TAP system one of the nicest out there in my opinion: everything works together, everyone uses the same tool, and you can add on to the framework to suit your needs with very little additional work.