Bats Shell Testing Patterns

About

This skill empowers Claude Code with the specialized knowledge required to implement production-grade testing for shell utilities and CI/CD pipelines. It offers proven patterns for exit code assertions, output verification, file-system state testing, and complex mocking strategies. By leveraging these Bats (Bash Automated Testing System) patterns, developers can ensure their shell scripts are maintainable, portable across different shell dialects, and fully integrated into automated DevOps workflows, enabling a Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach for shell scripting.

Key Features

• Standardized setup and teardown routines for temporary file-system fixtures.
• Patterns for validating shell compatibility across Bash, Sh, and Dash dialects.
• Comprehensive assertion patterns for exit codes, strings, and multi-line output.
• Integration strategies for GitHub Actions and Makefile-driven CI/CD workflows.
• 2 GitHub stars
• Advanced mocking and stubbing techniques for external commands and environment variables.

Use Cases

• Automating shell script validation within CI/CD pipelines to catch regressions early.
• Creating isolated test environments using temporary directories and mocked dependencies.
• Implementing Test-Driven Development (TDD) for complex infrastructure and automation scripts.