VTC

Vinyl Cache Test Case Syntax

Manual section:

7

OVERVIEW

This document describes the syntax used by Vinyl Cache Test Cases files (.vtc). A vtc file describe a scenario with different scripted HTTP-talking entities, and generally one or more Vinyl Cache instances to test.

PARSING

A vtc file will be read word after word, with very little tokenization, meaning a syntax error won’t be detected until the test actually reach the relevant action in the test.

A parsing error will most of the time result in an assert being triggered. If this happens, please refer yourself to the related source file and line number. However, this guide should help you avoid the most common mistakes.

Words and strings

The parser splits words by detecting whitespace characters and a string is a word, or a series of words on the same line enclosed by double-quotes (”…”), or, for multi-line strings, enclosed in curly brackets ({…}).

Comments

The leading whitespaces of lines are ignored. Empty lines (or ones consisting only of whitespaces) are ignored too, as are the lines starting with “#” that are comments.

Lines and commands

Test files take at most one command per line, with the first word of the line being the command and the following ones being its arguments. To continue over to a new line without breaking the argument string, you can escape the newline character (\n) with a backslash (\).

MACROS

When a string is processed, macro expansion is performed. Macros are in the form ${<name>[,<args>...]}, they have a name followed by an optional comma- or space-separated list of arguments. Leading and trailing spaces are ignored.

The macros ${foo,bar,baz} and ${ foo bar baz } are equivalent. If an argument contains a space or a comma, arguments can be quoted. For example the macro ${foo,"bar,baz"} gives one argument bar,baz to the macro called foo.

Unless documented otherwise, all macros are simple macros that don’t take arguments.

Built-in macros

${bad_backend}

A socket address that will reliably never accept connections.

${bad_ip}

An unlikely IPv4 address.

${date}

The current date and time formatted for HTTP.

${listen_addr}

The default listen address various components use, by default a random port on localhost.

${localhost}

The first IP address that resolves to “localhost”.

${pwd}

The working directory from which vinyltest was executed.

${string,<action>[,<args>...]}

The string macro is the entry point for text generation, it takes a specialized action with each its own set of arguments.

${string,repeat,<uint>,<str>}

Repeat uint times the string str.

${testdir}

The directory containing the VTC script of the ongoing test case execution.

${tmpdir}

The dedicated working directory for the ongoing test case execution, which happens to also be the current working directory. Useful when an absolute path to the working directory is needed.

${topbuild}

Only present when the -i option is used, to work on Vinyl Cache itself instead of a regular installation.

SYNTAX

HISTORY

This document has been written by Guillaume Quintard.

SEE ALSO