Welcome

Welcome to "Advanced Rust testing"!
No application is an island: you need to interact with third-party APIs, databases and who knows what else. Testing those interactions is tricky, to say the least! This course will focus on expanding your Rust testing toolkit, going beyond the basic techniques you're already familiar with. At the end of the course you'll have a strategy to test most of the scenarios that are relevant for a complex Rust application.

The course assumes you have a good understanding of Rust's basic concepts and want to move beyond the built-in testing toolkit.

Methodology

This course is based on the "learn by doing" principle.
You'll build up your knowledge in small, manageable steps. It has been designed to be interactive and hands-on.

Mainmatter developed this course to be delivered in a classroom setting, over a whole day: each attendee advances through the lessons at their own pace, with an experienced instructor providing guidance, answering questions and diving deeper into the topics as needed.
If you're interested in attending one of our training sessions, or if you'd like to bring this course to your company, please get in touch.

You can also take the course on your own, but we recommend you find a friend or a mentor to help you along the way should you get stuck. You can also find solutions to all exercises in the solutions branch of the GitHub repository.

Prerequisites

To follow this course, you must install Rust.
If Rust is already installed on your machine, make sure to update it to the latest version:

# If you installed Rust using `rustup`, the recommended way,
# you can update to the latest stable toolchain with:
rustup update stable

You'll also need the nightly toolchain, so make sure to install it:

rustup toolchain install nightly

You also need to install ctr (Check Test Results), a little tool that will be invoked to verify the outcomes of your tests:

# Install `ctr` from the top-level folder of the repository
cargo install --path ctr

Don't start the course until you have these tools installed and working.

Structure

On the left side of the screen, you can see that the course is divided into sections.
To verify your understanding, each section is paired with an exercise that you need to solve.

You can find the exercises in the companion GitHub repository.
Before starting the course, make sure to clone the repository to your local machine:

# If you have an SSH key set up with GitHub
git clone git@github.com:mainmatter/rust-advanced-testing-workshop.git
# Otherwise, use the HTTPS URL:
#
#   git clone https://github.com/mainmatter/rust-advanced-testing-workshop.git

We recommend you work on a branch, so you can easily track your progress and pull updates from the main repository if needed:

cd rust-advanced-testing-workshop
git checkout -b my-solutions

All exercises are located in the exercises folder. Each exercise is structured as a Rust package. The package contains the exercise itself, instructions on what to do (in src/lib.rs), and a mechanism to automatically verify your solution.

`wr`, the workshop runner

To verify your solutions, we've provided a tool that will guide you through the course. It is the wr CLI (short for "workshop runner"). Install it with:

cargo install --locked workshop-runner

In a new terminal, navigate back to the top-level folder of the repository. Run the wr command to start the course:

wr

wr will verify the solution to the current exercise.
Don't move on to the next section until you've solved the exercise for the current one.

We recommend committing your solutions to Git as you progress through the course, so you can easily track your progress and "restart" from a known point if needed.

Enjoy the course!

Author

This course was written by Luca Palmieri, Principal Engineering Consultant at Mainmatter.
Luca has been working with Rust since 2018, initially at TrueLayer and then at AWS.
Luca is the author of "Zero to Production in Rust", the go-to resource for learning how to build backend applications in Rust, and "100 Exercises to Learn Rust", a learn-by-doing introduction to Rust itself.
He is also the author and maintainer of a variety of open-source Rust projects, including cargo-chef, Pavex and wiremock.

Exercise

The exercise for this section is located in 00_intro/00_welcome

Advanced Rust testing