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building-testing.rst

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Building and testing

To actually run highlight.js it is necessary to build it for the environment where you're going to run it: a browser, the node.js server, etc.

Building

The build tool is written in JavaScript using node.js. Before running the script, make sure to have node installed and run npm install to get the dependencies.

The tool is located in tools/build.js. A few useful examples:

  • Build for a browser using only common languages:

    node tools/build.js :common

  • Build for node.js including all available languages:

    node tools/build.js -t node

  • Build two specific languages for debugging, skipping compression in this case:

    node tools/build.js -n python ruby

On some systems the node binary is named nodejs; simply replace node with nodejs in the examples above if that is the case.

The full option reference is available with the usual --help option.

The build result will be in the build/ directory.

Basic testing

The usual approach to debugging and testing a language is first doing it visually. You need to build highlight.js with only the language you're working on (without compression, to have readable code in browser error messages) and then use the Developer tool in tools/developer.html to see how it highlights a test snippet in that language.

A test snippet should be short and give the idea of the overall look of the language. It shouldn't include every possible syntactic element and shouldn't even make practical sense.

After you satisfied with the result you need to make sure that language detection still works with your language definition included in the whole suite.

Testing is done using Mocha and the files are found in the test/ directory. You can use the node build to run the tests in the command line with npm test after installing the dependencies with npm install.

Note: for Debian-based machine, like Ubuntu, you might need to create an alias or symbolic link for nodejs to node. The reason for this is the dependencies that are requires to test highlight.js has a reference to "node".

Place the snippet you used inside the browser in test/detect/<language>/default.txt, build the package with all the languages for node and run the test suite. If your language breaks auto-detection, it should be fixed by :ref:`improving relevance <relevance>`, which is a black art in and of itself. When in doubt, please refer to the discussion group!

Testing markup

You can also provide additional markup tests for the language to test isolated cases of various syntactic construct. If your language has 19 different string literals or complicated heuristics for telling division (/) apart from regexes (/ .. /) -- this is the place.

A test case consists of two files:

  • test/markup/<language>/<test_name>.txt: test code
  • test/markup/<language>/<test_name>.expect.txt: reference rendering

To generate reference rendering use the Developer tool located at tools/developer.html. Make sure to explicitly select your language in the drop-down menu, as automatic detection is unlikely to work in this case.