Test Anything Protocol
TAP, the Test Anything Protocol, is a simple text-based interface between testing modules in a test harness. It decouples the reporting of errors from the presentation of the reports.
One of its major uses is for noise reduction; when you have a suite of many tests, making them TAP producers and using a TAP consumer to view them helps ensures that you will see everything you need to notice and diagnose breakage without being distracted by a flood of irrelevant success messages. It can assist other forms of analysis and statistics-gathering as well.
TAP started life as part of the test harness for Perl but now has implementations in C, C , Python, PHP, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Go, Rust, and others. Consumers and producers do not have to be written in the same language to interoperate.
Here’s what a TAP test stream looks like:
1..4
ok 1 - Input file opened
not ok 2 - First line of the input valid
ok 3 - Read the rest of the file
not ok 4 - Summarized correctly # TODO Not written yet
Testing with TAP
- Testing with TAP - How to run TAP based tests in your language of choice
TAP Development
- TAP Producers - Testing tools that generate TAP output
- TAP Consumers - Test harnesses that read TAP
- TAP Philosophy - The Tao of TAP
- TAP History - The story of TAP