CppUnit

CppUnit is an open source command-line software implemented in C++ as a port of the Java powered JUnit unit testing framework created by Michael Feathers. It works on Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

Features at a glance

Key features include support for XML output, compiler-like text output that can be integrated with an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), helper macros, support for hierarchical test fixture, test registry, as well as test plugins.

In addition, the CppUnit project features a protector that can be used to encapsulate test execution, MfcTestRunner and a Qt-based graphical test runner called QtTestRunner. CppUnit supports supervised tests.

Getting started with CppUnit

To install and use the CppUnit unit testing framework on your GNU/Linux computer, you must download the latest version from Softoware, save the archive somewhere on your computer (preferably your Home directory), and unpack it using an archive manager utility.

Open the Terminal app and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command (e.g. /home/softoware/cppunit-1.13.2), run the ./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program, and then execute the ‘make install’ command as root to install it system wide (alternatively, you can use the ‘sudo make install’ command).

After installation, you must run the ‘cppunit-config’ command in the terminal emulator to configure various aspects of the program, such as compilation supports options by enabling printing of pre-processor and compiler flags, as well as printing of library linking information, and specify the install directories where CppUnit was configured to.

Under the hood and supported distributions of Linux

Looking under the hood of CppUnit, we can notice that the program has been written entirely in the C++ programming language. It has been tested with a wide range of GNU/Linux distributions and it’s compatible with 64-bit and 32-bit hardware architectures.