The regression tests can be run against an already installed and running server, or using a temporary installation within the build tree. Furthermore, there is a “parallel” and a “sequential” mode for running the tests. The sequential method runs each test script alone, while the parallel method starts up multiple server processes to run groups of tests in parallel. Parallel testing adds confidence that interprocess communication and locking are working correctly.
To run the parallel regression tests after building but before installation, type:
make check
in the top-level directory. (Or you can change to
src/test/regress
and run the command there.)
At the end you should see something like:
=======================
All 193 tests passed.
=======================
or otherwise a note about which tests failed. See Section 33.2 below before assuming that a “failure” represents a serious problem.
Because this test method runs a temporary server, it will not work if you did the build as the root user, since the server will not start as root. Recommended procedure is not to do the build as root, or else to perform testing after completing the installation.
If you have configured PostgreSQL to install
into a location where an older PostgreSQL
installation already exists, and you perform make check
before installing the new version, you might find that the tests fail
because the new programs try to use the already-installed shared
libraries. (Typical symptoms are complaints about undefined symbols.)
If you wish to run the tests before overwriting the old installation,
you'll need to build with configure --disable-rpath
.
It is not recommended that you use this option for the final installation,
however.
The parallel regression test starts quite a few processes under your
user ID. Presently, the maximum concurrency is twenty parallel test
scripts, which means forty processes: there's a server process and a
psql process for each test script.
So if your system enforces a per-user limit on the number of processes,
make sure this limit is at least fifty or so, else you might get
random-seeming failures in the parallel test. If you are not in
a position to raise the limit, you can cut down the degree of parallelism
by setting the MAX_CONNECTIONS
parameter. For example:
make MAX_CONNECTIONS=10 check
runs no more than ten tests concurrently.
To run the tests after installation (see Chapter 17), initialize a data directory and start the server as explained in Chapter 19, then type:
make installcheck
or for a parallel test:
make installcheck-parallel
The tests will expect to contact the server at the local host and the
default port number, unless directed otherwise by PGHOST
and
PGPORT
environment variables. The tests will be run in a
database named regression
; any existing database by this name
will be dropped.
The tests will also transiently create some cluster-wide objects, such as
roles, tablespaces, and subscriptions. These objects will have names
beginning with regress_
. Beware of
using installcheck
mode with an installation that has
any actual global objects named that way.
The make check
and make installcheck
commands
run only the “core” regression tests, which test built-in
functionality of the PostgreSQL server. The source
distribution contains many additional test suites, most of them having
to do with add-on functionality such as optional procedural languages.
To run all test suites applicable to the modules that have been selected to be built, including the core tests, type one of these commands at the top of the build tree:
make check-world make installcheck-world
These commands run the tests using temporary servers or an
already-installed server, respectively, just as previously explained
for make check
and make installcheck
. Other
considerations are the same as previously explained for each method.
Note that make check-world
builds a separate instance
(temporary data directory) for each tested module, so it requires more
time and disk space than make installcheck-world
.
On a modern machine with multiple CPU cores and no tight operating-system limits, you can make things go substantially faster with parallelism. The recipe that most PostgreSQL developers actually use for running all tests is something like
make check-world -j8 >/dev/null
with a -j
limit near to or a bit more than the number
of available cores. Discarding stdout
eliminates chatter that's not interesting when you just want to verify
success. (In case of failure, the stderr
messages are usually enough to determine where to look closer.)
Alternatively, you can run individual test suites by typing
make check
or make installcheck
in the appropriate
subdirectory of the build tree. Keep in mind that make
installcheck
assumes you've installed the relevant module(s), not
only the core server.
The additional tests that can be invoked this way include:
Regression tests for optional procedural languages.
These are located under src/pl
.
Regression tests for contrib
modules,
located under contrib
.
Not all contrib
modules have tests.
Regression tests for the interface libraries,
located in src/interfaces/libpq/test
and
src/interfaces/ecpg/test
.
Tests for core-supported authentication methods,
located in src/test/authentication
.
(See below for additional authentication-related tests.)
Tests stressing behavior of concurrent sessions,
located in src/test/isolation
.
Tests for crash recovery and physical replication,
located in src/test/recovery
.
Tests for logical replication,
located in src/test/subscription
.
Tests of client programs, located under src/bin
.
When using installcheck
mode, these tests will create
and destroy test databases whose names
include regression
, for
example pl_regression
or contrib_regression
. Beware of
using installcheck
mode with an installation that has
any non-test databases named that way.
Some of these auxiliary test suites use the TAP infrastructure explained
in Section 33.4.
The TAP-based tests are run only when PostgreSQL was configured with the
option --enable-tap-tests
. This is recommended for
development, but can be omitted if there is no suitable Perl installation.
Some test suites are not run by default, either because they are not secure
to run on a multiuser system or because they require special software. You
can decide which test suites to run additionally by setting the
make
or environment variable
PG_TEST_EXTRA
to a whitespace-separated list, for
example:
make check-world PG_TEST_EXTRA='kerberos ldap ssl'
The following values are currently supported:
kerberos
Runs the test suite under src/test/kerberos
. This
requires an MIT Kerberos installation and opens TCP/IP listen sockets.
ldap
Runs the test suite under src/test/ldap
. This
requires an OpenLDAP installation and opens
TCP/IP listen sockets.
ssl
Runs the test suite under src/test/ssl
. This opens TCP/IP listen sockets.
Tests for features that are not supported by the current build
configuration are not run even if they are mentioned in
PG_TEST_EXTRA
.
In addition, there are tests in src/test/modules
which will be run by make check-world
but not
by make installcheck-world
. This is because they
install non-production extensions or have other side-effects that are
considered undesirable for a production installation. You can
use make install
and make
installcheck
in one of those subdirectories if you wish,
but it's not recommended to do so with a non-test server.
By default, tests using a temporary installation use the
locale defined in the current environment and the corresponding
database encoding as determined by initdb
. It
can be useful to test different locales by setting the appropriate
environment variables, for example:
make check LANG=C make check LC_COLLATE=en_US.utf8 LC_CTYPE=fr_CA.utf8
For implementation reasons, setting LC_ALL
does not
work for this purpose; all the other locale-related environment
variables do work.
When testing against an existing installation, the locale is determined by the existing database cluster and cannot be set separately for the test run.
You can also choose the database encoding explicitly by setting
the variable ENCODING
, for example:
make check LANG=C ENCODING=EUC_JP
Setting the database encoding this way typically only makes sense if the locale is C; otherwise the encoding is chosen automatically from the locale, and specifying an encoding that does not match the locale will result in an error.
The database encoding can be set for tests against either a temporary or an existing installation, though in the latter case it must be compatible with the installation's locale.
Custom server settings to use when running a regression test suite can be
set in the PGOPTIONS
environment variable (for settings
that allow this):
make check PGOPTIONS="-c force_parallel_mode=regress -c work_mem=50MB"
When running against a temporary installation, custom settings can also be
set by supplying a pre-written postgresql.conf
:
echo 'log_checkpoints = on' > test_postgresql.conf echo 'work_mem = 50MB' >> test_postgresql.conf make check EXTRA_REGRESS_OPTS="--temp-config=test_postgresql.conf"
This can be useful to enable additional logging, adjust resource limits, or enable extra run-time checks such as debug_discard_caches.
The core regression test suite contains a few test files that are not
run by default, because they might be platform-dependent or take a
very long time to run. You can run these or other extra test
files by setting the variable EXTRA_TESTS
. For
example, to run the numeric_big
test:
make check EXTRA_TESTS=numeric_big
The source distribution also contains regression tests for the static behavior of Hot Standby. These tests require a running primary server and a running standby server that is accepting new WAL changes from the primary (using either file-based log shipping or streaming replication). Those servers are not automatically created for you, nor is replication setup documented here. Please check the various sections of the documentation devoted to the required commands and related issues.
To run the Hot Standby tests, first create a database
called regression
on the primary:
psql -h primary -c "CREATE DATABASE regression"
Next, run the preparatory script
src/test/regress/sql/hs_primary_setup.sql
on the primary in the regression database, for example:
psql -h primary -f src/test/regress/sql/hs_primary_setup.sql regression
Allow these changes to propagate to the standby.
Now arrange for the default database connection to be to the standby
server under test (for example, by setting the PGHOST
and
PGPORT
environment variables).
Finally, run make standbycheck
in the regression directory:
cd src/test/regress make standbycheck
Some extreme behaviors can also be generated on the primary using the
script src/test/regress/sql/hs_primary_extremes.sql
to allow the behavior of the standby to be tested.