palpatine VS nyc

I have been working on building my static site generator palpatine for the last two months. However, I have not had the chance yet to package it up to create my first release yet. When I attempted to package it up a few days ago, I ended up with a lot of errors and bugs that would require lots of time to debug. I plan on sitting with it next week again.

While developing palpatine, I used Makefile to automate the process of building and running the project.

One of the personal projects I love developing is palpatine. I blogged about it here and I am constantly adding new features to it! So far it has reached 5 starts and keeps growing with the help of the open-source community.

Writing unit tests for my static site generator - palpatine, taught me an entirely new testing framework called Catch2. For my Hacktoberfest pull request this year I had done a unit testing contribution for a repository and I am currently working on building a microservice for my cloud computing class which requires us to use Jest for JavaScript unit testing. So, I can say that I have some experience with unit testing and continuing to develop my skills in it.

See the directory called cmake in the root directory of palpatine. Having cmake modules within the directory cmake is commonly used, the purpose of doing is to include() custom CMake functions to be used later in the project.

I have been developing a CLI tool called palpatine for a while now. It is a static site generator (SSG) written in C++ and still under development, ready for the support of the community in GitHub. This Hacktoberfest, I experienced the role of a contributor in open source but in the next Hacktoberfest, I will be participating as a maintainer of palpatine!

Ensuring everything is working as intended makes sense in principle, for example, I currently am developing a static site generator in cpp, palpatine, and as I develop it I stress about writing unit tests for it. Soon enough whenever a bug occurs I will be writing unit tests before debugging it. While writing unit tests though, I need to keep in mind that they won't stick around forever, my ssg tool is rapidly evolving; refactoring, adding new features, fixing bugs and shipping new releases day by day. That said, the unit tests will be obsolete soon enough and I might end up spending more time maintaining unit tests than actually developing the tool. Thus my philosophy at writing unit tests is to write them when they are actually needed, maybe when the consequences of breaking the code are high or when they are solving a specific problem.

While developing palpatine, I found myself browsing through the internet and getting inspired by how other static site generators (SSG) tackled my problems (i.e. supporting md files, stylesheets, exception handling). During this process, it was obvious to me that JavaScript dominated the field of static site generators, as almost all the options I looked at, were Javascript-based. Some of the interesting ones I found were: Docusaurus, Gatsby, Jekyll and Eleventy. They all have their unique features, competing with all other SSGs, and are constantly being maintained by the community in GitHub.   Docusaurus has a showcase page where you can see how other serious projects are using their tool, such as Jest website built with Docusaurus, it is inspiring when you see their pages professionally done. So I initially read their documentation on how to get started, very straightforward, and within minutes I was able to set up my docusaurus site! Key features to note are: easy to use, beautiful themes, precise documentation and customizable.

I ended up with new file FileHandler.h with the base class Handler and the classes MarkdownHandler , TextHandler which inherits the base class. They have virtual functions that are overridden in the derived classes, so that I can use the concept of polymorphism respectively.

To add a new feature to palpatine which is an awesome static site generator written in C++ by Batuhan, I started by filing an issue. While I worked on his repo for adding this new feature, he worked on mine to add the same feature. Here are the detailed instructions for this week's lab. Batuhan also worked on my repo for adding the –config feature for my static site generator, rwar, written in Python. These are awesome repos to check out!

Native code coverage via v8 or istanbul.

Writing tests is essential, and knowing whether you test all the required cases for your logic is even more critical. The most common testing coverage tool is Istanbul, where you can see how well your tests exercise your code by lines, functions, and branches. Below is an example of how the test coverage report looks in your terminal:

Here is a quote from istanbul, one of the most used code coverage tool:

Unit testing framework was already implemented, using Vitest so I started hacking by setting up a coverage provider to explicitly identify the covered/uncovered lines and mentioned this to the maintainer in the comments. I used Istanbul 🇹🇷 for this purpose.

Your project probably has a coverage report. If you’re using Jest as your unit test runner, generating a coverage report is embedded in it. It is done with Istanbul under the hood, which generates a nice HTML page presenting the entire project unit test coverage.

> This is a rant written by someone with just enough understanding to be dangerous, but not quite enough wisdom to know why things are still the way they are. Most of the complaints raised are subtly inaccurate.

Author seems aware of CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE: https://source.small-tech.org/site.js/app/-/issues/169 and https://github.com/istanbuljs/nyc/issues/1281 – the "side effects" are NodeJS explicitly checking for it, so that's a NodeJS thing and not a Linux thing.

Yet curiously it's completely unmentioned in this article, in spite that this is probably what started the author's dislike of privileged ports. I guess it was inconvenient as it got in the way of angrily ranting.

This approach will create two json coverage files, which will be merged together by NYC. Therefore the results will be purely local. If You don't mind using online tools like Codecov or Coveralls for merging data from different tests, then go ahead and use them. They will probably also be more accurate. But if You still want to learn how to get coverage from E2E, then please read through

https://istanbul.js.org/ measures how much of your code is covered by tests

Jest uses a package called Istanbul to provide test coverage metrics such as statement, branch, function, and line coverage so that you can understand and enforce the quality of your test suite, providing more confidence in releases.

So let’s see if nyc (the code coverage generator) can help with that. Hmm… this documentation seems interesting! So basically what I understand from it is that I need to collect all the reports from the different packages and then run the nyc report over it. The flow should be like this: