Main/99 Work/0 OneSec/OneSecNotes/30 Engineering Skills/Coding/Continuous Integration.md

I have been wanting to code properly with unit tests and continuous integration for a few years now and have never done it properly.

Development Process

Unit Testing

C++

In C++ we use the GTest Framework Framework.

Code Coverage

Code coverage testing basically compiles the code with profiling flags, which count the number of times a specific line has been executed. And since google test runs the source code we can test if we are testing all the code that we have written. For C++ typically, a tool called gcovr is used. In order for it to work you need to compile the code with the following flags: -fprofile-arcs and -ftest-coverage If the project uses CMake you can add the following to your CMakeLists.txt:

if(CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_ID MATCHES GNU)

set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS} -fprofile-arcs -ftest-coverage")

endif()

Online Tools

In order to do continuous integration we need a place that automatically runs our unit tests whenever a commit is pushed.

GitLab

Gitlab is known for its Gitlab - CI CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) pipeline. It allows to customize and automate the entire process very effectively. The setup process is also very easy and explained well on their website.

1. You must have runners¹ available
2. Create a .gitlab-ci.yml file at the root of your repository. The entire pipeline of automated tests is defined in this file.

A good example repo can be found here. My own first gitlab-ci config file (.gitlab-ci.yml):

image: ubuntu:20.04

job:
	script:
		- export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
		- apt-get update
		- apt-get install -y cmake g++ build-essential git gcovr 
		- cd onesec3d_cpp
		- mkdir build && cd build
		- cmake -DBUILD_TESTING=ON ..
		- cmake --build .
		- export DATADIR=../test/sample_3d_files/
		- ./test/onesec3d_cpp_test
		- gcovr --exclude-directories '_deps' -r ..

Flashcards

#learning/cpp which command to do code coverage testing;;gcovr

requirements for gcovr;; project must be built with flags: -fprofile-arcs and -ftest-coverage

Resources

• CI for robotics projects with ROS2: use Gazebo that is run on the gitlab server: http://moore-mike.com/bobble-ci.html

Footnotes

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1. GitLab Runner is an application that can execute CI/CD jobs in a GitLab pipeline ↩︎