How can I run testthat in 'auto' mode such that when I'm editing files in my R folder, only specific tests are re-run?
I have a lot of tests and some are slower than others. I need to be able to run specific tests or else I'll be waiting for up to 15 minutes for my test suite to complete. (I'd like to make the test suite faster, but that's not a realistic option right now.)
Ideally, I'd like to specify a grep expression to select the tests I want. In the JavaScript world, MochaJs and Jest both support grepping to select tests by name or by file.
Alternatively, I'd be OK with being able to specify a file directly - as long as I can do it with "auto test" support.
Here's what I've found so far with testthat:
- testthat::auto_test_package runs everything at first, but only re-runs a specific test file if you edit that test file. However, if you edit any code in the R folder, it re-runs all tests.
- testthat::auto_test accepts a path to a directory of test-files to test. However, testthat doesn't seem to support putting tests into different subdirectories if you want to use devtools::test or testthat::auto_test_package. Am I missing something?
- testthat::test_file can run the tests from one file, but it doesn't support "auto" re-running the tests with changes.
- testthat::test_dir has a filter argument, but it only filters files, not tests; it also doesn't support "auto" re-running tests
Versions:
- R: 3.6.2 (2019-12-12)
- testthat: 2.3.1
Addendum
I created a simple repo to demo the problem: https://github.com/generalui/select_testthat_tests
If you open that, run:
renv::restore()
testthat::auto_test_package()
It takes forever because one of the tests is slow. If I'm working on other tests, I want to skip the slow tests and only run the tests I've selected. Grepping for tests is a standard feature of test tools, so I'm sure R must have a way. testthat::test_dir has a filter option to filter files, but how do you filter on test-names, and how do you filter with auto_test_package? I just can't find it.
How do you do something like this in R:
testthat::auto_test_package(filter = 'double_it')
And have it run:
"double_it(2) == 4""double_it(3) == 6"
BUT NOT
"work_hard returns 'wow'"
Thanks!
