• What can it be used for?
• Documentation
• Getting started
• How to get it
  • Maven
  • Gradle
• Podcasts
• Examples
• Approved File Artifacts
• More Info
  • No Checked Exceptions Philosophy
• LICENSE
• Developer notes

Capturing Human Intelligence - ApprovalTests is an open source assertion/verification library to aid unit testing.

It is compatible with JUnit 3, 4 & 5 and TestNG.

The jars can be used from JDK 1.8 on up until JDK 18.

Approval Tests can be used for verifying objects that require more than a simple assert. They also come prepackaged with utilities for some common java scenarios including

• HashMaps & Collections
• Long Strings
• Log Files
• JPanels
• Xml
• Html
• Json
• Getting Legacy Code under tests

• ApprovalTests
• ApprovalTests-util

The best way to get started is download and open one of the starter projects:

• Java
  • Maven
  • Gradle
• Kotlin
• Groovy
• Scala

These are standard projects and can be imported into any editor or IDE.
They also all have CI with Github actions.

You might also want to check out the Getting Started Overview

It's on Maven Central, search for 'approvaltests'.

If you're using Maven, add this to your pom file:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.approvaltests</groupId>
    <artifactId>approvaltests</artifactId>
    <version>15.5.0</version>
</dependency>

dependencies {
    testImplementation("com.approvaltests:approvaltests:15.5.0")
}

or download the jars from maven central repository

You can watch a bunch of short videos on getting started and using ApprovalTests in Java at youtube.

Note: There are a lot of videos about ApprovalTests in .Net They are equally useful for understanding the concepts despite being in a different programming language.

If you prefer auditory learning, you might enjoy the following podcast (Note: Some of these talk about the .net side)

• Cucumber Podcast
• Hanselminutes
• Herding Code

ApprovalTests eats it own dogfood, so the best examples are in the source code itself.

None the less, Here's a quick look

public class SampleArrayTest
{
  @Test
  public void testList()
  {
    String[] names = {"Llewellyn", "James", "Dan", "Jason", "Katrina"};
    Arrays.sort(names);
    Approvals.verifyAll("", names);
  }
}

^{snippet source | anchor}

Will Produce a File SampleArrayTest.testList.received.txt

[0] = Dan
[1] = James
[2] = Jason
[3] = Katrina
[4] = Llewellyn

^{snippet source | anchor}

Simply rename this to SampleTest.testList.approved.txt and the test will now pass.

The *.approved.* files must be checked into source your source control. This can be an issue with git as it will change the line endings. The suggested fix is to add *.approved.* binary to your .gitattributes

• ApprovalTests.com

Approval Tests follows the no checked exceptions" philosophy. That is, our API only throws runtime exceptions.

Apache 2.0 License

twitter: @LlewellynFalco or #ApprovalTests

The suggested way to contribute to ApprovalTests is to pair with Llewellyn
However, if you are set on forking please read these notes