Perl-based TAP tests
====================

src/test/perl/ contains shared infrastructure that's used by Perl-based tests
across the source tree, particularly tests in src/bin and src/test. It's used
to drive tests for backup and restore, replication, etc - anything that can't
really be expressed using pg_regress or the isolation test framework.

You should prefer to write tests using pg_regress in src/test/regress, or
isolation tester specs in src/test/isolation, if possible. If not, check to
see if your new tests make sense under an existing tree in src/test, like
src/test/ssl, or should be added to one of the suites for an existing utility.

Writing tests
-------------

Tests are written using Perl's Test::More with some PostgreSQL-specific
infrastructure from src/test/perl providing node management, support for
invoking 'psql' to run queries and get results, etc. You should read the
documentation for Test::More before trying to write tests.

Test scripts in the t/ subdirectory of a suite are executed in alphabetical
order.

Each test script should begin with:

    use strict;
    use warnings;
    use PostgresNode;
    use TestLib;
    # Replace with the number of tests to execute:
    use Test::More tests => 1;

then it will generally need to set up one or more nodes, run commands
against them and evaluate the results. For example:

    my $node = get_new_node('master');
    $node->init;
    $node->start;

    my $ret = $node->psql('postgres', 'SELECT 1');
    is($ret, '1', 'SELECT 1 returns 1');

    $node->stop('fast');

Read the Test::More documentation for more on how to write tests:

    perldoc Test::More

For available PostgreSQL-specific test methods and some example tests read the
perldoc for the test modules, e.g.:

    perldoc src/test/perl/PostgresNode.pm
