Contents
CMake target
Automatic test registration
CMake project options
Installing Catch2 from git repository
Installing Catch2 from vcpkg
Because we use CMake to build Catch2, we also provide a couple of integration points for our users.
1) Catch2 exports a (namespaced) CMake target
2) Catch2's repository contains CMake scripts for automatic registration
of TEST_CASE
s in CTest
Catch2's CMake build exports an interface target Catch2::Catch2
. Linking
against it will add the proper include path and all necessary capabilities
to the resulting binary.
This means that if Catch2 has been installed on the system, it should be enough to do:
find_package(Catch2 REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(tests Catch2::Catch2)
This target is also provided when Catch2 is used as a subdirectory.
Assuming that Catch2 has been cloned to lib/Catch2
:
add_subdirectory(lib/Catch2)
target_link_libraries(tests Catch2::Catch2)
Another possibility is to use FetchContent:
Include(FetchContent)
FetchContent_Declare(
Catch2
GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/catchorg/Catch2.git
GIT_TAG v2.13.1)
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(Catch2)
target_link_libraries(tests Catch2::Catch2)
Catch2's repository also contains two CMake scripts that help users
with automatically registering their TEST_CASE
s with CTest. They
can be found in the contrib
folder, and are
1) Catch.cmake
(and its dependency CatchAddTests.cmake
)
2) ParseAndAddCatchTests.cmake
(deprecated)
If Catch2 has been installed in system, both of these can be used after
doing find_package(Catch2 REQUIRED)
. Otherwise you need to add them
to your CMake module path.
Catch.cmake
and CatchAddTests.cmake
Catch.cmake
provides function catch_discover_tests
to get tests from
a target. This function works by running the resulting executable with
--list-test-names-only
flag, and then parsing the output to find all
existing tests.
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.5)
project(baz LANGUAGES CXX VERSION 0.0.1)
find_package(Catch2 REQUIRED)
add_executable(foo test.cpp)
target_link_libraries(foo Catch2::Catch2)
include(CTest)
include(Catch)
catch_discover_tests(foo)
catch_discover_tests
can be given several extra argumets:
catch_discover_tests(target
[TEST_SPEC arg1...]
[EXTRA_ARGS arg1...]
[WORKING_DIRECTORY dir]
[TEST_PREFIX prefix]
[TEST_SUFFIX suffix]
[PROPERTIES name1 value1...]
[TEST_LIST var]
[REPORTER reporter]
[OUTPUT_DIR dir]
[OUTPUT_PREFIX prefix]
[OUTPUT_SUFFIX suffix]
)
TEST_SPEC arg1...
Specifies test cases, wildcarded test cases, tags and tag expressions to
pass to the Catch executable alongside the --list-test-names-only
flag.
EXTRA_ARGS arg1...
Any extra arguments to pass on the command line to each test case.
WORKING_DIRECTORY dir
Specifies the directory in which to run the discovered test cases. If this option is not provided, the current binary directory is used.
TEST_PREFIX prefix
Specifies a prefix to be added to the name of each discovered test case.
This can be useful when the same test executable is being used in multiple
calls to catch_discover_tests()
, with different TEST_SPEC
or EXTRA_ARGS
.
TEST_SUFFIX suffix
Same as TEST_PREFIX
, except it specific the suffix for the test names.
Both TEST_PREFIX
and TEST_SUFFIX
can be specified at the same time.
PROPERTIES name1 value1...
Specifies additional properties to be set on all tests discovered by this
invocation of catch_discover_tests
.
TEST_LIST var
Make the list of tests available in the variable var
, rather than the
default <target>_TESTS
. This can be useful when the same test
executable is being used in multiple calls to catch_discover_tests()
.
Note that this variable is only available in CTest.
REPORTER reporter
Use the specified reporter when running the test case. The reporter will
be passed to the test runner as --reporter reporter
.
OUTPUT_DIR dir
If specified, the parameter is passed along as
--out dir/<test_name>
to test executable. The actual file name is the
same as the test name. This should be used instead of
EXTRA_ARGS --out foo
to avoid race conditions writing the result output
when using parallel test execution.
OUTPUT_PREFIX prefix
May be used in conjunction with OUTPUT_DIR
.
If specified, prefix
is added to each output file name, like so
--out dir/prefix<test_name>
.
OUTPUT_SUFFIX suffix
May be used in conjunction with OUTPUT_DIR
.
If specified, suffix
is added to each output file name, like so
--out dir/<test_name>suffix
. This can be used to add a file extension to
the output file name e.g. ".xml".
ParseAndAddCatchTests.cmake
⚠ This script is deprecated
in Catch 2.13.4 and superseded by the above approach using catch_discover_tests
.
See #2092 for details.
ParseAndAddCatchTests
works by parsing all implementation files
associated with the provided target, and registering them via CTest's
add_test
. This approach has some limitations, such as the fact that
commented-out tests will be registered anyway. More serious, only a
subset of the assertion macros currently available in Catch can be
detected by this script and tests with any macros that cannot be
parsed are silently ignored.
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.5)
project(baz LANGUAGES CXX VERSION 0.0.1)
find_package(Catch2 REQUIRED)
add_executable(foo test.cpp)
target_link_libraries(foo Catch2::Catch2)
include(CTest)
include(ParseAndAddCatchTests)
ParseAndAddCatchTests(foo)
ParseAndAddCatchTests
provides some customization points:
PARSE_CATCH_TESTS_VERBOSE
-- When ON
, the script prints debug
messages. Defaults to OFF
.PARSE_CATCH_TESTS_NO_HIDDEN_TESTS
-- When ON
, hidden tests (tests
tagged with any of [!hide]
, [.]
or [.foo]
) will not be registered.
Defaults to OFF
.PARSE_CATCH_TESTS_ADD_FIXTURE_IN_TEST_NAME
-- When ON
, adds fixture
class name to the test name in CTest. Defaults to ON
.PARSE_CATCH_TESTS_ADD_TARGET_IN_TEST_NAME
-- When ON
, adds target
name to the test name in CTest. Defaults to ON
.PARSE_CATCH_TESTS_ADD_TO_CONFIGURE_DEPENDS
-- When ON
, adds test
file to CMAKE_CONFIGURE_DEPENDS
. This means that the CMake configuration
step will be re-ran when the test files change, letting new tests be
automatically discovered. Defaults to OFF
.Optionally, one can specify a launching command to run tests by setting the
variable OptionalCatchTestLauncher
before calling ParseAndAddCatchTests
. For
instance to run some tests using MPI
and other sequentially, one can write
set(OptionalCatchTestLauncher ${MPIEXEC} ${MPIEXEC_NUMPROC_FLAG} ${NUMPROC})
ParseAndAddCatchTests(mpi_foo)
unset(OptionalCatchTestLauncher)
ParseAndAddCatchTests(bar)
Catch2's CMake project also provides some options for other projects that consume it. These are
CATCH_BUILD_TESTING
-- When ON
, Catch2's SelfTest project will be
built. Defaults to ON
. Note that Catch2 also obeys BUILD_TESTING
CMake
variable, so both of them need to be ON
for the SelfTest to be built,
and either of them can be set to OFF
to disable building SelfTest.CATCH_BUILD_EXAMPLES
-- When ON
, Catch2's usage examples will be
built. Defaults to OFF
.CATCH_INSTALL_DOCS
-- When ON
, Catch2's documentation will be
included in the installation. Defaults to ON
.CATCH_INSTALL_HELPERS
-- When ON
, Catch2's contrib folder will be
included in the installation. Defaults to ON
.BUILD_TESTING
-- When ON
and the project is not used as a subproject,
Catch2's test binary will be built. Defaults to ON
.If you cannot install Catch2 from a package manager (e.g. Ubuntu 16.04 provides catch only in version 1.2.0) you might want to install it from the repository instead. Assuming you have enough rights, you can just install it to the default location, like so:
$ git clone https://github.com/catchorg/Catch2.git
$ cd Catch2
$ cmake -Bbuild -H. -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF
$ sudo cmake --build build/ --target install
If you do not have superuser rights, you will also need to specify CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX when configuring the build, and then modify your calls to find_package accordingly.
Alternatively, you can build and install Catch2 using vcpkg dependency manager:
git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git
cd vcpkg
./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh
./vcpkg integrate install
./vcpkg install catch2
The catch2 port in vcpkg is kept up to date by microsoft team members and community contributors. If the version is out of date, please create an issue or pull request on the vcpkg repository.