History of Busted

You may have been hearing a lot about Lua; it's used in an awful lot of neat places nowadays. Lua's actually been used in lots of neat places for a while, but it seems that it's gotten a bit of spotlight recently, with things like Redis integration, Wikipedia templates, mobile development, and gaming of all sorts.

Lua's really fast, especially with Luajit (it's been removed from the benchmarks game, but you can look at the Lua benchmarks and extrapolate data from the official Luajit benchmarks). It's also fairly widely used in the gaming world, and it's a fun and easy language to use. So, for some fun projects, my friends and I are building games using Lua to run RESTful game servers, with Node.js to build the web game interfaces.

The only issue we've had so far with Lua is that we've had to build a few tools ourselves to get the same environment that we enjoy in other languages, like Node.js, so we can be just as effective. One of the tools we built is busted, a testing framework written in Lua for Lua. It started off as a few assertions, and has grown into a full library including everything from testing deep-equality of tables (Lua's version of objects), to spies and mocks, to asynchonous, time-based tests.

Our first goal was to make it simple and easy to use, taking cues from such frameworks as Jasmine, Mocha, RSpec, JUnit, and others. We also wanted to have really nice terminal output and integration with testing frameworks, so you could run your Lua tests from systems like Travis CI, Jenkins, and anything else. We integrated i18n support through a simple i18n library, and we're now translated into 9 different langauges!

Busted uses our luassert library, which is separated from busted itself so that any testing library can use them.

Busted also supports Moonscript, a Coffeescript analogue, and Terra, a low-level counterpart to Lua.

With that background, let's dig a little into how to use busted for your own projects.

Installation

The first thing you'll need to do is install Luarocks. Depending on your environment, you can apt-get luarocks, brew install luarocks, or otherwise get it from luarocks.org. That done, you can run luarocks install busted to install the busted runtime and executable script, which will run in most variations of Linuxes, OSX, and Windows.

Writing Tests

The homepage has an example that looks something like:

describe("Busted unit testing framework", function()
  describe("should be awesome", function()
    it("should be easy to use", function()
      assert.truthy("Yup.")
    end)

    it("should provide some shortcuts to common functions", function()
      assert.are.unique({
        { thing = 1 },
        { thing = 2 },
        { thing = 3 }
      })
    end)

    it("should have mocks and spies for functional tests", function()
      local thing = require("thing_module")
      spy.on(thing, "greet")
      thing.greet("Hi!")

      assert.spy(thing.greet).was.called()
      assert.spy(thing.greet).was.called_with("Hi!")
    end)
  end)
end)

If you save this to a file like spec/busted_spec.lua, you can run busted, which will automatically look for files matching spec/*_spec.lua, recursively. You can also use command-line options to change the pattern.

At the top of the spec file, after doing any requireing of code or initialization of globals, you can start writing a describe block. That block will take a name and a function. Inside the block, you can write it blocks, which are the tests themselves and will contain any asserts; you can also write pending blocks for tests you'll come back to later.

Busted's super easy to get started with; read up in the docs to find out more about spies, async tests, assertions, internationalization, and more!