Update: Modified link to point to specific tag of github-api-haskell project

Update: See follow-up post

I recently got into using doctest to run tests embedded in my Haskell code as comments. Having enjoyed using Python doctest in the past, this made me very happy.

The little toy app I’ve been working on is my GitHub client which now contains lovely tests embedded as comments, for example:

So, this is wonderful and great. I can even run my doctests using the following little bash script:

As you can see, I am an aficionado of Stack. Anyway, one useful property of this script is that it will run all doctests in all .hs files in my src directory.

The next step for my project was then to add a test-suite target to my project so that my doctests run when I run stack test . I followed the instructions on the doctest README and then ran into a problem. These instructions suggest create a new test-suite section with main-is referencing a test main looking something like:

Unfortunately, this requires me to do one of two things:

Hardcode the list of source files names into doctests.hs

Write globbing code in doctests.hs to discover all the test files

I realized that this is something that other people must’ve run into and, sure enough, I discovered doctest-discover designed specifically to deal with this scenario. This is when things got interesting: doctest-discover ’s version constraints on base were incompatible with any of the Stack build plans available to me. Therefore, I forked doctest-discover and updated my project’s stack.yaml to refer to my fork via a GitHub package location:

Thus, I am now able to reference my own hacked version of this module to implement the standard auto-discovering entry point for my doctests:

Fun!