how the ~~sausage~~ doctests get made

One of rustdoc’s greatest features is the ability to take code samples within your documentation and run them like tests. This ensures that all your samples stay up to date with your library’s API changes. However, there are some steps that need to happen to massage these “doctests” into something that can be compiled and run like a regular program.

To understand why we need to modify code samples at all, let’s take a look at a typical one. Here’s a small sample from the front page of the rand crate:

use rand :: Rng ; let mut rng = rand :: thread_rng (); if rng .gen () { // random bool println! ( "i32: {}, u32: {}" , rng .gen :: < i32 > (), rng .gen :: < u32 > ()) }

The code is written such that you could copy/paste it into your own function to generate some random numbers. You can’t really take this and compile it as a standalone executable; it’s missing the crate import for rand or a main function. To make things even more complicated, farther down that same page there are two more examples that each feature a handwritten main function, so we can’t just blindly wrap everything with fn main .

For these and other reasons, rustdoc has built up a few rules it applies to doctests before handing them off to the test runner. I want to take the rest of this post taking that linked function apart, and walking a doctest from “handwritten code sample” to “test code ready to compile and run”. There are some hidden features that get exposed here, and I’d like to show them off.

The very first thing it does is one of these lesser-known features. Did you know you can inject arbitrary crate-level attributes into all your tests? If you add #![doc(test(attr(...)))] to the root of your crate, rustdoc will pick up that ... and copy that as a series of attributes in any doctests in that crate. For example, the standard library has #![doc(test(attr(deny(warnings), allow(dead_code, deprecated, unused_variables, unused_mut))))] to run several lints on their doctests, but allow several that would otherwise distract from the example.

Anyway, the very first thing that rustdoc does is inspect this list of attributes, if it’s there, and insert them into the beginning of the final test. However, if these attributes are not provided, rather than insert nothing, it inserts #![allow(unused)] instead. unused is a lint group that includes some usual things you would expect to hit in a short code example - dead code, unused variables, unused mutability, things like that. These warnings are masked in doctests to clean up the test output.

So for that sample from rand above, there are no attributes to add from #![doc(test(attr(...)))] , so instead it adds #![allow(unused)] and moves on:

#![allow(unused)] use rand :: Rng ; let mut rng = rand :: thread_rng (); if rng .gen () { // random bool println! ( "i32: {}, u32: {}" , rng .gen :: < i32 > (), rng .gen :: < u32 > ()) }

Next, it looks at the sample and sees whether it has any #![top_attributes] or extern crate declarations; at the beginning, and also sticks those at the top of the final test. Inner attributes at the beginning of a test are usually #![feature(...)] attributes, which can only be at the very top of a crate. If we stick these inside a generated function, the test won’t even compile! As for crate imports, those can go inside a function declaration, but then something unusual happens when you try to use them: they’re not automatically imported into scope. So if you wanted to pull something from the crate without a use statement, you’d have to write self::some_crate::SomeType instead. So we pull those out too, to save that headache.

(That last part was only merged very recently, and is currently only available on nightly.)

Our demo sample doesn’t have any attributes or crate imports to speak of, so this step is skipped.

Next, rustdoc adds a crate import for the containing crate. There are actually a few conditions it checks before adding this, to make sure there are no potential clashes:

There are no extern crate statements manually written into the doctest. Some samples will want to deliberately show off importing the crate, or may want to apply a #[macro_use] statement to the import, so rustdoc needs to look through the sample for crate imports. If it finds one, it assumes that the crate was manually imported already, so it won’t add a duplicate import. The crate doesn’t add the #![doc(test(no_crate_inject))] attribute in its root. This attribute is used by the standard library facade to keep tests from getting the wrong crate imported when a test is relocated from (for example) core to std . The crate being documented isn’t named std . The compiler automatically imports std anyway, so manually adding it would just clash with that. ( std also adds no_crate_inject so this check is slightly redundant, but in case someone else writes a custom libstd, this will cover them.) We’re documenting a crate, and not a standalone Markdown file. This is slightly assumed throughout this post, but rustdoc can also run tests on standalone Markdown files, so in that case there’s no “containing crate” to link against. The sample in question uses the name of the crate somewhere. Adding a crate import would be redundant if the sample in question doesn’t use it, so rustdoc will skip this step if it doesn’t see the crate name used in the sample.

If all of these conditions hold, then it will add an extern crate my_crate; to the final test. Most of these are fairly easy to hit and only meant for rather niche cases, but these are the situations rustdoc has had to deal with before. All told, our sample from rand passes the test, so the crate import gets added behind the scenes:

#![allow(unused)] extern crate rand ; use rand :: Rng ; let mut rng = rand :: thread_rng (); if rng .gen () { // random bool println! ( "i32: {}, u32: {}" , rng .gen :: < i32 > (), rng .gen :: < u32 > ()) }

Next, we want to see whether the test wrote in its own fn main . Many small examples don’t need to specify their own entry point, so they just write under the assumption that they’re in a function already. However, we need to compile the sample as if it were a standalone binary. So rustdoc scans through the sample to make sure it doesn’t define its own fn main , and if it doesn’t find one, it wraps the remaining part of the original sample in a new one.

So with our sample from rand , this is the final output that gets compiled:

#![allow(unused)] extern crate rand ; fn main () { use rand :: Rng ; let mut rng = rand :: thread_rng (); if rng .gen () { // random bool println! ( "i32: {}, u32: {}" , rng .gen :: < i32 > (), rng .gen :: < u32 > ()) } }

(…it actually doesn’t indent the generated main function, but I did that here for the sake of legibility. >_> )

Rustdoc stores this final result as the representation of the test that it compiles and runs. This way, when the test runner comes to this slot in the test sequence, it can take the text it saved earlier and hand it off to the compiler to build.