Heya,

Does anyone know of a swanky web-based way to run perl test files?

The situation I'm facing is this:

* I'd like to deploy the tests on a web-based application, making sure nothing fails, when I do an actual install for this app - installation mainly means, uploading some files via FTP, setting some config parts and changing the permissions of the main script. Pretty easy stuff.

* My development "community" isn't really that active in checking out dev. copies of the program, running the tests included and reporting back, so this usually falls on my back. I personally don't have a million different testing platforms, so it becomes difficult to mark something as, "stable", even if it passes tests on my few different environments. I also don't have an incentive to purchase or cobble together different environments, because of laziness and lack of monetary resources.

* Sometimes I don't have access to a CLI -0 el-cheapo web hosts sometimes don't give out ssh access, so I thought having a web-based way would save me some trouble, since the app is mostly a web-based app anyways. I was looking for something pretty polished, as it would be an incentive to bundle the test suite (a directory of .t files) with the app itself and have a friendly way for any user to run the tests out and report back.

Basically, hacking together this:

 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w 

use CGI qw(:fatalsToBrowser); 
use CGI qw(:standard); 

$|++; 

my $Test_Files = './t';

print header(); 
print "<h1>Starting...</h1>"; 


my $test_files = get_test_files(); 

foreach $file(@$test_files){ 

    print "<h2>$file</h2>"; 
    print "<hr><pre>";
#   print `perl $Test_Files/$file`;   
    print `prove -r -v $Test_Files/$file`; 
  
    print "</pre>"; 
    
}


print "<h1>Done!</h1>"; 



sub get_test_files { 

    my @tests;  
    if(opendir(TESTDIR, $Test_Files)){ 
        my $tf; 
            while(defined($tf = readdir TESTDIR) ) {
                next if $tf   =~ /^\.\.?$/;
                $tf           =~ s(^.*/)();
                if($tf =~ m{\.t$}){ 
                    push(@tests, $tf); 
                } 
            }
        closedir(TESTDIR) or warn "couldn't close: " . $Test_Files; 
    }
    return \@tests; 
}
[download]

Does pretty much what I want, albeit in a not so very pretty way, but that's easily polished up. Some problems I can see happening could possibly be: browser timeouts from a script that takes a long time running all the tests, a screen of HTML that seems to never end, misc. problems that aren't really reported in the browser, environment differences between running a script via the CLI and your web browser, etc.

Has anyone thought of a more interesting solution?

Again, I just want to *run* tests in my web-browser, I don't want to run tests *as* a web browser.