This is a concise, TAP-compliant, R package for writing unit tests. Authored tests that can be run with R CMD check with minimal implementation overhead.

The unittest package provides a single function, ok, that prints "ok" when the expression provided evaluates to TRUE and "not ok" if the expression evaluates to anything else or results in an error.

If you are writing a package see the "I'm writing a package, how do I put tests in it?" section in the package documentation.

The package was inspired by Perl's Test::Simple.

If you want more features there are other unit testing packages out there; see testthat, RUnit, svUnit.

You have a simple function in the file myfunction.R that looks something like this

biggest <- function(x,y) { max(c(x,y)) }

To test this create a file called test_myfunction.R in the same directory containing

library(unittest, quietly = TRUE)

source('myfunction.R')

ok( biggest(3,4) == 4, "two numbers" )    
ok( biggest(c(5,3),c(3,4)) == 5, "two vectors" )    

Now in an R session source() the test file

source('test_myfunction.R')

and you will see the test results. That's it. Now each time you edit myfunction.R re-sourcing test_myfunction.R reloads your function and runs your unit tests.

In an R session type

install.packages('unittest')

In an R session type

pkg_file <- tempfile()
download.file(url = 'https://github.com/ravingmantis/unittest/archive/master.tar.gz', mode = 'wb', method = 'wget', destfile = pkg_file)
install.packages(pkg_file, repos = NULL, type = 'source')

Assumes that the CRAN package downloader is installed.

In an R session type

library(downloader)
pkg_file <- tempfile()
download(url = 'https://github.com/ravingmantis/unittest/archive/master.tar.gz', mode = 'wb', destfile = pkg_file)
install.packages(pkg_file, repos = NULL, type = 'source')