README.md
1Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format 2=================================================== 3 4Copyright 2008 Google Inc. 5 6This directory contains conformance tests for testing completeness and 7correctness of Protocol Buffers implementations. These tests are designed 8to be easy to run against any Protocol Buffers implementation. 9 10This directory contains the tester process `conformance-test`, which 11contains all of the tests themselves. Then separate programs written 12in whatever language you want to test communicate with the tester 13program over a pipe. 14 15Before running any of these tests, make sure you run `make` in the base 16directory to build `protoc`, since all the tests depend on it. 17 18 $ make 19 20Running the tests for C++ 21------------------------- 22 23To run the tests against the C++ implementation, run: 24 25 $ cd conformance && make test_cpp 26 27Running the tests for JavaScript (Node.js) 28------------------------------------------ 29 30To run the JavaScript tests against Node.js, make sure you have "node" 31on your path and then run: 32 33 $ cd conformance && make test_nodejs 34 35Running the tests for Ruby (MRI) 36-------------------------------- 37 38To run the Ruby tests against MRI, first build the C extension: 39 40 $ cd ruby && rake 41 42Then run the tests like so: 43 44 $ cd conformance && make test_ruby 45 46Running the tests for other languages 47------------------------------------- 48 49Most of the languages in the Protobuf source tree are set up to run 50conformance tests. However some of them are more tricky to set up 51properly. See `tests.sh` in the base of the repository to see how 52Travis runs the tests. 53 54Testing other Protocol Buffer implementations 55--------------------------------------------- 56 57To run these tests against a new Protocol Buffers implementation, write a 58program in your language that uses the protobuf implementation you want 59to test. This program should implement the testing protocol defined in 60[conformance.proto](https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/master/conformance/conformance.proto). 61This is designed to be as easy as possible: the C++ version is only 62150 lines and is a good example for what this program should look like 63(see [conformance_cpp.cc](https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/master/conformance/conformance_cpp.cc)). 64The program only needs to be able to read from stdin and write to stdout. 65 66Portability 67----------- 68 69Note that the test runner currently does not work on Windows. Patches 70to fix this are welcome! (But please get in touch first to settle on 71a general implementation strategy). 72