Automated testing plays a critical role in software development and maintainance. OpenResty provides a data-driven test scaffold for writing declarative test cases for NGINX C modules, Lua libraries, and even OpenResty applications. The test cases are written in a specification-like format, which is both intuitive to read and write for humans and also easy to handle for machines. The data-driven approach makes it easy to run the same tests in wildly different ways that can help expose issues in different scenarios or with different kinds of external tools.

This chapter introduces the Test::Nginx test scaffold that has been widely used to organize test suites for almost all the OpenResty components, including the ngx_http_lua module, most of the lua-resty-* Lua libraries, as well as full-blown business applications like CloudFlare’s Lua CDN and Lua SSL.

Keywords: Testing, Mocking