Shellspec

I picked shellspec without too much research or experience, so don’t really know how it compares to shUnit2 etc.

A snag is (at time of writing) it’s not included in Arch Linux’s pacman list, so needs to be manually installed.

This involves:

git clone https://github.com/shellspec/shellspec.git
cd shellspec
ln -s shellspec /usr/local/bin

Shellspec is a behavior-driven development (BDD) framework, broadly following its Given-When-Then syntax.

These tests are grouped in blocks using a choice of three synonymous keywords, and each test can start with one of three synomymous keywords.

Outer blocks (Describe and Context are aliases for ExampleGroup)

• Context
• Describe
• ExampleGroup

Inner blocks (It and Specify are aliases for Example)

• It
• Specify
• Example

Since I like example-driven development (ie examples double as documentation), I favour:

ExampleGroup 'my group of examples'

  Example 'first example'
    # Given is not a shellspec keyword
    When...
    # Then is not a shellspec keyword
  End

End

Given

Shellspec doesn’t use given, but does have Data to set the starting state.

When

• https://github.com/shellspec/shellspec?tab=readme-ov-file#when---evaluation
• https://github.com/shellspec/shellspec/blob/master/docs/references.md#evaluation

Then

Shellspec uses The instead of then followed by modifiers and matchers.