Getting started

To start using Anteater, download a binary package for your platform:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=42970

Install the Anteater package in a directory owned by you with your permissions. In the current release, Anteater requires write access to the installation directory, as its internal Tomcat servlet container needs to write various files.

You need to add Anteater's bin/ directory in the PATH:

 $ PATH=/path/to/Anteater/bin:$PATH
 $ export PATH

To write your own scripts you need to declare in them the Anteater tasks and types. Here is a simple skeleton for an Anteater test script:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<project name="Anteater-testscript" default="main">
  <taskdef resource="META-INF/Anteater.tasks"/>
  <typedef resource="META-INF/Anteater.types"/>

  <target name="mytest">
    <echo>
      Start writing Anteater tasks here
    </echo>
  </target>

  <target name="main" depends="mytest"/>
</project>

You can name the file however you like it. To run the test script, simply run:

 $ anteater -f <your-test-file> [<test target>]
            

If you have installed everything correctly, you should see something like:

Buildfile: simple.xml

mytest:
     [echo] 
      Start writing Anteater tasks here
    

main:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 1 second

Here's a complete example, which checks that the Anteater website is online, and that the main page contains the word Anteater:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<project name="Anteater-test" default="main">
  <taskdef resource="META-INF/Anteater.tasks"/>
  <typedef resource="META-INF/Anteater.types"/>

  <property name="url" value="http://aft.sourceforge.net/index.html"/>

  <target name="check-website">
    <echo>Now downloading and testing ${url}</echo>
    <httpRequest href="${url}">
      <match>
        <responseCode value="200"/>
        <header name="Content-Type" assign="contenttype"/>
        <regexp>Anteater</regexp>
      </match>
    </httpRequest>
    <echo>URL has Content-Type: ${contenttype}</echo>
  </target>

  <target name="main" depends="check-website"/>
</project>
        

Note the use of Ant Properties, which are very useful for defining reusable bits of text. More documentation on the various Ant commands is available at http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/manual

Also notice how tests like header can be used to assign properties. In general, any test element can also double as a way of assigning a value. So for example, <contentEquals assign="filecontents"/> will capture the contents of a file into variable ${filecontents}.

Here is another example, this time not requiring an external site:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<project name="Anteater-test" default="main" basedir=".">

  <taskdef resource="META-INF/Anteater.tasks"/>
  <typedef resource="META-INF/Anteater.types"/>

  <target name="init">
    <servletContainer port="8100"/>
  </target>

  <target name="content-check" depends="init">
    <echo>Content-check</echo>

    <parallel>
      <listener path="/good.html">
        <match>
          <method value="GET"/>
          <sendResponse href="test/responses/good.html"
            contentType="text/html"
            responseCode="301"/>
        </match>
      </listener>

      <sequential>
        <sleep seconds="1"/>
        <httpRequest path="/good.html">
          <match>
            <responseCode value="301"/>
            <contentEquals href="test/responses/good.html"/>
          </match>
        </httpRequest>
      </sequential>
    </parallel>
  </target>

  <target name="main" depends="content-check"/>

</project>

What is happening here? Well, notice that the first target to be run is init. This contains a servletContainer task, which starts up a Tomcat server on the specified port (any port above 1024 should do). Then the content-check target runs, and via the parallel task, starts a listener, as well as an httpRequest, both in parallel. You guessed it: the httpRequest is going to send a query to the listener. Anteater is acting as both a HTTP server and client.

Internally, the listener registers with the Tomcat instance to handle requests for path /good.html. The 1 second delay is to give Tomcat a chance to start up. Then the httpRequest task triggers, sending the request. The listener's sendResponse task triggers, sending back a HTTP response to the httpRequest, which validates it with the contentEquals task. The test assumes there to be a HTML file in test/responses/good.html, relative to the basedir attribute of the project element.

This pattern of starting a server, registering a listener and then running a test against it is very useful for testing new scripts. For production use, you will probably want to either test against a live server (external to Anteater), or use the deploy task to deploy a webapp to the internal Tomcat server, and then test against that. The deploy task is handy for continuous integration-style, automated (cron-driven) testing.

Default properties

<group id="default">
  <property name="debug" value="1"/> <!-- 0 lowest, 10 highest -->
  <property name="host" value="mysite.com"/>
  <property name="port" value="8080"/>
</group>

Logging

<group id="default">
  <logger type="xml"/>
  <logger type="colour"/>
</group>

<target name="report" description="Generate a HTML report">
  <ant antfile="${anteater.report}">
    <property name="log.dir" value="${log.dir}"/>
    <property name="report.dir" value="reports"/>
  </ant>
</target>