Writing and Running Unit Tests

CCL uses the pytest package to run a suite of unit tests. This package can be installed via pip or conda with [pip|conda] install pytest.

Running the Unit Tests

To run the unit tests, execute

pytest -vv pyccl

from the top-level repository directory. Any errors will be reported at the end.

Other useful pytest options include

  • -k <name of test>: adding this option with the name of the test will force pytest to only run that test

  • -s: this option makes pytest print all output to STDOUT instead of its usual behavior of suppressing output

  • -x: this option forces pytest to stop after the first failed test

  • --pdb: this option will launch the Python debugger for failed tests, usually you want to combine it with -s -x -k <name of test> in order to debug a single failed test

Writing Unit Tests

Please follow the following guidelines when writing unit tests.

  1. All unit tests should be written as modules in the pytest/tests submodule.

  2. Each unit test is a function that does some operation with CCL and then uses a Python assert statement. A unit test is marked by pytest as failed when the assert statement fails.

  3. The unit tests should be fast, ideally less than a second or so. This requirement means avoiding running CLASS or CAMB when it is not needed.

  4. The unit tests file should have a name that matches the python module it is testing (e.g., pyccl/tests/test_bcm.py for pyccl/bcm.py).

  5. The unit test function itself should have a name that starts with test_ and is also descriptive.

An example of a unit test would be a file at pyccl/tests/test_core.py with the test

import numpy as np
import pyccl

def test_cosmology_sigma8_consistent():
    cosmo = pyccl.Cosmology(
        Omega_c=0.25, Omega_b=0.05, h=0.7, sigma8=0.8, n_s=0.95,
        transfer_function='bbks')
    assert np.allclose(pyccl.sigma8(cosmo), 0.8)

Building and Running CCL’s C Unit Tests

CCL has a few vestigial unit tests written in C. Once you have CMake installed (see Getting CMake), you can build them with the following commands from the top-level CCL directory

$ mkdir -p build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make check_ccl

Then you can run the tests via

$ ./check_ccl