I'm writing here just in case some plugin developers would be interested in implementing an automated test suite for a Sigil plugin (also, suggestions for improvement are always welcome).
I understand that for most plugins an automated test suite would be an overkill, but for a plugin of medium or high complexity I think that would be a plus.
Until two weeks ago, I had no idea if such an implementation would be feasible without too much headache. Turned out it's not too complex, at least for my needs.
All the source code of the implementation for my last plugin is on
github (is it ok to link it here?).
What I did in summary:
- I created a python3.8 virtual environment and installed via pip all the necessary dependencies (you can find which they are in the various Building_Sigil_on_* docs in the
Sigil documentation on github. Probably a global installation or the bundled python interpreter shipped with Sigil installers would work the same, I didn't try it).
- I tweaked with a shell script the PYTHONPATH environment variable to include the /path/to/sigil/plugin_launchers/python and the path to my plugin files (which are obviously platform and installation dependent). That's not exactly the same as in the real Sigil environment, since the paths added to PYTHONPATH are appended to sys.path, so there is the risk of name clashes (but for small projects that's very unlikely).
- In the same script I set the environment variable SigilGumboLibPath to make it point to the shared library of sigilgumbo (this is platform dependent too, and I think it's needed only if the plugin uses the sigil's gumbo adapter for sigil_bs4).
- After that, in the tests, I just needed to create a mock to use instead of the BookContainer object.
And that's it. I don't know if there are simpler or better ways to simulate enough of Sigil environment to test the plugins, that's just what I put together in the last few days.
If you have any questions or advice, I'm all ears...