Testing A GenServer

I recently wrote a small example app in Elixir and wanted to add some tests. I quickly realized that I've never tested a GenServer directly so I had a new thing to learn. 🎉

First naive attempt.

At first I just fired up my GenServer in setup:

This worked...for the first test. The following tests crashed because it was trying to start a process with the same id.

After some digging I found a post on Elixir Forum where a person had encountered a similar problem. A guy named Jose Valim had answered, stating :

You need to make the name a parameter and pass different ones.

So I messed around with my Supervisor my tests and my GenServer with no luck. Even after discovering ExUnit's start_supervised which sounded like just the thing I needed, I could not spin up a new GenServer for each test.

So I asked for help on the aforementioned forum post and got some clues from Jose. 👍

It works!

Even though the docs for start_supervised are quite detailed, it wasn't until Jose wrote the following that I connected the dots.

The first argument to start_supervised is the child_spec

So I ended up with the following setup in my test:

There might be room for improvement but it does the job of spinning up my Supervisor and GenServer (worker) for each test.

Now I could write a test like

Thanks!

Thank you Jose, for taking the time to answer questions like mine on the forum. I'm sure you have a lot of stuff on your plate. Being the creator of Elixir and all...

Code

Can be found at https://gitlab.com/smedegaard/heroes_engine