Hello monkses,

I'm currently finishing off a module I plan to release on CPAN. It would be beneficial if the test suite included tests against a live server (simulated tests are also included, but not as good as the real thing). For this I need to prompt the user for some information, to see whether he has such a server available and what it's address etc. are.

I gather that putting interactivity into the general test suite is a big no-no (it breaks the automated smoke tests for one), so I've been thinking about how I could do this and come up with the following: 

use Test::More qw(no_plan);

use strict;
use warnings;

SKIP: {
    skip qq(Won't run automatically, execute "export MyModOPTRUN=yes" 
+to enable interactive test)
        unless ($ENV{MyModOPTRUN} && $ENV{MyModOPTRUN} eq "yes");
    warn "\nEnter your innermost secret:\n";
    my $secret = (<STDIN>);
    ok ($secret,"Yep, that's it");
}

[download]

Obviously replacing "MyMod" with the actual name of my module. This will produce

t/02.optional....ok
        1/1 skipped: Not running automatically, execute "export MyModO
+PTRUN=yes" to enable interactive test
All tests successful, 1 subtest skipped.
Files=1, Tests=1,  0 wallclock secs ( 0.00 cusr +  0.01 csys =  0.01 C
+PU)

[download]

When run without the environment variable set, which should be all right I think.

Are there any problems with this approach? Does the "export" syntax even work on non-*NIX-shells? If not, is there an equivalent (I can test for $^O and adjust the skip message accordingly)? Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks in advance


All dogma is stupid.

In reply to Interactivity in tests - done correctly? by tirwhan

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