The Cosmos SDK contains different types of tests. These tests have different goals and are used at different stages of the development cycle. We advice, as a general rule, to use tests at all stages of the development cycle. It is adviced, as a chain developer, to test your application and modules in a similar way than the SDK. The rationale behind testing can be found in ADR-59.

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Unit Tests​

Unit tests are the lowest test category of the test pyramid. All packages and modules should have unit test coverage. Modules should have their dependencies mocked: this means mocking keepers. The SDK uses mockgen to generate mocks for keepers: scripts/mockgen.sh 
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See full example on GitHub You can read more about mockgen here.

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Example​

As an example, we will walkthrough the keeper tests of the x/gov module. The x/gov module has a Keeper type requires a few external dependencies (ie. imports outside x/gov to work properly). x/gov/keeper/keeper.go 
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See full example on GitHub In order to only test x/gov, we mock the expected keepers and instantiate the Keeper with the mocked dependencies. Note that we may need to configure the mocked dependencies to return the expected values: x/gov/keeper/common_test.go 
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See full example on GitHub This allows us to test the x/gov module without having to import other modules. x/gov/keeper/keeper_test.go 
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See full example on GitHub We can test then create unit tests using the newly created Keeper instance. x/gov/keeper/keeper_test.go 
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See full example on GitHub

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Integration Tests​

Integration tests are at the second level of the test pyramid. In the SDK, we locate our integration tests under /tests/integrations. The goal of these integration tests is to test how a component interacts with other dependencies. Compared to unit tests, integration tests do not mock dependencies. Instead, they use the direct dependencies of the component. This differs as well from end-to-end tests, which test the component with a full application. Integration tests interact with the tested module via the defined Msg and Query services. The result of the test can be verified by checking the state of the application, by checking the emitted events or the response. It is adviced to combine two of these methods to verify the result of the test. The SDK provides small helpers for quickly setting up an integration tests. These helpers can be found at https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk/blob/main/testutil/integration.

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Example​

testutil/integration/example_test.go 
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See full example on GitHub

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Deterministic and Regression tests​

Tests are written for queries in the Cosmos SDK which have module_query_safe Protobuf annotation. Each query is tested using 2 methods:
  • Use property-based testing with the rapid library. The property that is tested is that the query response and gas consumption are the same upon 1000 query calls.
  • Regression tests are written with hardcoded responses and gas, and verify they don’t change upon 1000 calls and between SDK patch versions.
Here’s an example of regression tests: tests/integration/bank/keeper/deterministic_test.go 
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See full example on GitHub

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Simulations​

Simulations uses as well a minimal application, built with depinject:
You can as well use the AppConfig configurator for creating an AppConfig inline. There is no difference between those two ways, use whichever you prefer.
Following is an example for x/gov/ simulations: x/gov/simulation/operations_test.go 
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See full example on GitHub x/gov/simulation/operations_test.go 
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See full example on GitHub

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End-to-end Tests​

End-to-end tests are at the top of the test pyramid. They must test the whole application flow, from the user perspective (for instance, CLI tests). They are located under /tests/e2e. For that, the SDK is using simapp but you should use your own application (appd). Here are some examples:
The SDK is in the process of creating its E2E tests, as defined in ADR-59. This page will eventually be updated with better examples.

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Learn More​

Learn more about testing scope in ADR-59.