LuaUnit

by Philippe Fremy

LuaUnit is a popular unit-testing framework for Lua, with an interface typical of xUnit libraries (Python unittest, Junit, NUnit, ...). It supports several output formats (Text, TAP, JUnit, ...) to be used directly or work with Continuous Integration platforms (Jenkins, Hudson, ...).

LuaUnit may be installed as a rock <https://luarocks.org/modules/bluebird75/luaunit>__ or directly added to your project. For simplicity, LuaUnit is contained into a single-file and has no external dependency.

Tutorial and reference documentation is available on read-the-docs <http://luaunit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/>__.

LuaUnit may also be used as an assertion library, to validate assertions inside a running program. In addition, it provides a pretty stringifier which converts any type into a nicely formatted string (including complex nested or recursive tables).

More details

LuaUnit provides a wide range of assertions and goes into great efforts to provide the most useful output. For example since version 3.3 , comparing lists will provide a detailed difference analysis:

.. code:: lua

-- lua test code. Can you spot the difference ? function TestListCompare:test1() local A = { 121221, 122211, 121221, 122211, 121221, 122212, 121212, 122112, 122121, 121212, 122121 } local B = { 121221, 122211, 121221, 122211, 121221, 122212, 121212, 122112, 121221, 121212, 122121 } lu.assertEquals( A, B ) end

.. code:: sh

$ lua test_some_lists_comparison.lua

TestListCompare.test1 ... FAIL test/some_lists_comparisons.lua:22: expected:

List difference analysis:

lists A (actual) and B (expected) have the same size
lists A and B start differing at index 9
lists A and B are equal again from index 10
Common parts: = A[1], B[1]: 121221 = A[2], B[2]: 122211 = A[3], B[3]: 121221 = A[4], B[4]: 122211 = A[5], B[5]: 121221 = A[6], B[6]: 122212 = A[7], B[7]: 121212 = A[8], B[8]: 122112
Differing parts:
- A[9]: 122121
- B[9]: 121221
Common parts at the end of the lists = A[10], B[10]: 121212 = A[11], B[11]: 122121

The command-line options provide a flexible interface to select tests by name or patterns, control output format, set verbosity and more. See the documentation <http://luaunit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#command-line-options>__ .

LuaUnit also provides some dedicated support to scientific computing. See the documentation <http://luaunit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#scientific-computing-and-luaunit>__ .

LuaUnit is very well tested: code coverage is 99.5% . The test suite is run on every version of Lua (Lua 5.1 to 5.5 and LuaJIT 2.0) and on several OS (Windows Server, MacOs X and Ubuntu)

LuaUnit is maintained on GitHub: https://github.com/bluebird75/luaunit . We gladly accept feature requests and even better Pull Requests. For more information on LuaUnit development, please check: Developing LuaUnit <http://luaunit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/#developing-luaunit>__ .

LuaUnit is released under the BSD license.

The main developer can be reached at phil.fremy at free.fr . If you have security issue to report requiring confidentiality, this is the address to use.

LuaUnit successes

Version 3.4 of LuaUnit has been downloaded more than 270 000 times on LuaRocks <https://luarocks.org/modules/bluebird75/luaunit>__

LuaUnit is used in some very nice technological products. I like to mention:

SchedMD/Slurm <https://www.schedmd.com/>: Slurm is an open-source cluster resource management and job scheduling system that strives to be simple, scalable, portable, fault-tolerant, and interconnect agnostic. On the June 2017 Top 500 computer list, Slurm was performing workload management on six of the ten most powerful computers in the world including the number 1 system, Sunway TaihuLight with 10,649,600 computing cores. LuaUnit is used by Slurm to validate plugins written in Lua. Thanks Douglas Jacobsen to contribute back to LuaUnit. See the GitHub repository of Slurm <https://github.com/SchedMD/slurm> .
MAD by the CERN <http://mad.web.cern.ch/mad/>: CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. MAD is one of the CERN project: MAD aims to be at the forefront of computational physics in the field of particle accelerator design and simulation. Its scripting language is de facto the standard to describe particle accelerators, simulate beam dynamics and optimize beam optics at CERN. Lua is the main language of MAD-ng, the new generatino of MAD. A fork of LuaUnit is used extensively for all MAD calculation and framework validation. Thanks Laurent Deniau for contributing back to LuaUnit. See the GitHub repository of MAD <https://github.com/MethodicalAcceleratorDesign/MAD> .

Contributors

NiteHawk <https://github.com/n1tehawk>__
AbigailBuccaneer <https://github.com/AbigailBuccaneer>__
Juan Julián Merelo Guervós <https://github.com/JJ>__
Naoyuki Totani <https://github.com/ntotani>__
Jennal <https://github.com/Jennal>__
George Zhao <https://github.com/zhaozg>__
kbuschelman
Victor Seva <https://github.com/linuxmaniac>__
Urs Breu <https://github.com/ubreu>__
Jim Anderson
Douglas Jacobsen <https://github.com/dmjacobsen>__
Mayama Takeshi <https://github.com/MayamaTakeshi>__

Installation

LuaRocks

LuaUnit is available on LuaRocks <https://luarocks.org/modules/bluebird75/luaunit>__. To install it, you need at least LuaRocks version 2.4.4 (due to old versions of wget being incompatible with GitHub https downloading)

GitHub

The simplest way to install LuaUnit is to fetch the GitHub version:

git clone git@github.com:bluebird75/luaunit.git

Then copy the file luaunit.lua into your project or in the Lua libs directory (if you are using regular Lua) or in the lua directory if you are using LuaJIT.

The version of the main branch on GitHub is always stable and can be used safely.

History


.. _version-35---26-march-2026:

Version 3.5 - 26 March 2026
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

- support for Lua 5.5
- The name convention used to detect tests and test methods can now be
  adjusted with options ``--test-prefix``, ``--test-suffix``,
  ``--method-prefix``
- add possiblity to pass command-line arguments to
  ``runSuitByInstances()``
- bugfix:

  - LuaUnit correctly escapes invalid XML characters when outputting XML
  - better error management when errors occurs during ``setupSuite()``,
    ``teardownSuite()``, ``setupClass()`` and ``teardownClass()``

.. _version-34---02-march-2021:

Version 3.4 - 02 March 2021
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

- support for Lua 5.4
- ``assertAlmostEquals()`` works also on tables and nested structures
- choose test output style with environment variable ``LUAUNIT_OUTPUT``
- ``setOutputType()`` accepts the xml filename as second argument when
  using the format junit
- improve printing of table information in case of cycles
- add ability to skip tests with ``skip()`` and ``skipIf()``
- detect attempts to exit the test suite before it is finished running
- add ``assertErrorMsgContentEquals()`` to validate exactly any error
  message
- filter out some stack entries when printing assertions (useful when
  embedding LuaUnit inside another test layer) with
  ``STRIP_EXTRA_ENTRIES_IN_STACK_TRACE``
- add ``assertTableContains()`` and ``assertNotTableContains()`` to
  verify the presence of a given value within a table
- remove option ``TABLE_EQUALS_KEYBYCONTENT``, it did not make sense
- bugfix:

  - ``assertIs()``/``assertNotIs()`` deals better with protected
    metatables
  - ``assertEquals()`` deals better with tables containing cycles of
    different structure
  - fix table length comparison for table returning inconsistent length

.. _version-33---6-march-2018:

Version 3.3 - 6. March 2018
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

- General

  - when comparing lists with ``assertEquals()``, failure message provides
    an advanced comparison of the lists
  - ``assertErrorMsgEquals()`` can check for error raised as tables
  - tests may be finished early with ``fail()``, ``failIf()``,
    ``success()`` or ``successIf()``
  - improve printing of recursive tables
  - improvements and fixes to JUnit and TAP output
  - stricter ``assertTrue()`` and ``assertFalse()``: they only succeed
    with boolean values
  - add ``assertEvalToTrue()`` and ``assertEvalToFalse()`` with
    previous ``assertTrue()``/``assertFalse()`` behavior of coercing to
    boolean before asserting
  - all assertion functions accept an optional extra message, to be
    printed along the failure

- New command-line arguments:

  - can now shuffle tests with --shuffle or -s
  - possibility to repeat tests (for example to trigger a JIT), with
    --repeat NUM or -r NUM
  - more flexible test selection with inclusion (--pattern / -p) or
    exclusion (--exclude / -x) or combination of both

- Scientific computing dedicated support (see documentation):

  - provide the machine epsilon in ``lu.EPS``
  - new functions: ``assertNan()``, ``assertInf()``,
    ``assertPlusInf()``, ``assertMinusInf()``, ``assertPlusZero()``,
    ``assertMinusZero()``
  - in ``assertAlmostEquals( a, b, margin )``, ``margin`` no longer
    provides a default value of ``1E-11``; the machine epsilon is used
    instead

- Platform and continuous integration support:

  - validate LuaUnit on MacOs platform (thank to Travis CI)
  - validate LuaUnit with 32 bits numbers (floats) and 64 bits numbers
    (double)
  - add test coverage measurements thank to coveralls.io . Status:
    99.76% of the code is verified.
  - use cache for AppVeyor and Travis builds
  - support for luarocks doc command

- General doc

Luaunit

Install / Use

README

LuaUnit

More details

LuaUnit successes

Contributors

Installation