goncalotomas / common_test_shared_files_example

Example code for sharing files among different Common Test suites

shared_ct_files

Demo of how to share files between multiple Common Test suites.

Why would I need this

The premise for this is having multiple test suites that need to access the same files, which may happen for a variety of reasons. You may have a single input file for all of your tests, or you need to generate a release of one or more of your dependencies which then needs to be available to the test suites, etc.

Technique

To make this happen we leverage the priv directory, which is known by OTP projects. We then use a module to expose access to the shared directory in order to keep the code maintainable, would there be any need of changing the directory path.

The shared files are kept in their own ct_files folder so as to cleanly separate them from anything else you may need to keep in priv.

This is arguably better than using symlinks to share the files between the test suites' data directories, since this is a more standard way of approaching the issue.

See it working

Both suites included in this example have trivial tests that require access to the shared files. You may see these tests pass by running rebar3 ct.