Developer Guide

This guide covers how to develop and test Spellbook.

For a walkthrough of building new modules, see the project wiki.

Running the tests

The unit tests live in the tests/ directory and use Perl's standard Test::More framework. After installing the dependencies, run the whole suite with prove:

$ prove -lr tests/

Any test whose optional dependency is not installed is skipped rather than failed, so the suite is safe to run in a minimal environment. The same command runs automatically on every push through the test-on-ubuntu workflow.

Writing tests

Tests currently cover the Spellbook::Core::* modules. Each module has a dedicated file under tests/ (for example tests/core-helper.t), and tests/00-load.t checks that every Core module compiles.

When you add a test:

• Name the file tests/<area>-<module>.t.
• Add lib/ to @INC (the existing files use FindBin) and chdir to the repository root if the module reads files such as .config/modules.json.
• If the module relies on an optional CPAN prerequisite, guard the test with plan skip_all when that prerequisite is missing, following the pattern in the existing files, so the suite stays green in a minimal environment.