Testing with CI

Testing infrastructure

When a Pull Request is opened on GitHub, GitHub Actions will automatically launch a build that will run all tests on some configurations (x86_64-gnu-llvm-13 linux, x86_64-gnu-tools linux, and mingw-check linux). In essence, each runs ./x test with various different options.

The integration bot bors is used for coordinating merges to the master branch. When a PR is approved, it goes into a queue where merges are tested one at a time on a wide set of platforms using GitHub Actions. Due to the limit on the number of parallel jobs, we run CI under the rust-lang-ci organization except for PRs. Most platforms only run the build steps, some run a restricted set of tests, only a subset run the full suite of tests (see Rust's platform tiers).

If everything passes, then all of the distribution artifacts that were generated during the CI run are published.

Using CI to test

In some cases, a PR may run into problems with running tests on a particular platform or configuration. If you can't run those tests locally, don't hesitate to use CI resources to try out a fix.

As mentioned above, opening or updating a PR will only run on a small subset of configurations. Only when a PR is approved will it go through the full set of test configurations. However, you can try one of those configurations in your PR before it is approved. For example, if a Windows build fails, but you don't have access to a Windows machine, you can try running the Windows job that failed on CI within your PR after pushing a possible fix.

To do this, you'll need to edit src/ci/github-actions/ci.yml. The jobs section defines the jobs that will run. The jobs.pr section defines everything that will run in a push to a PR. The jobs.auto section defines the full set of tests that are run after a PR is approved. You can copy one of the definitions from the auto section up to the pr section.

For example, the x86_64-msvc-1 and x86_64-msvc-2 jobs are responsible for running the 64-bit MSVC tests. You can copy those up to the jobs.pr.strategy.matrix.include section with the other jobs.

The comment at the top of ci.yml will tell you to run this command:

./x run src/tools/expand-yaml-anchors

This will generate the true .github/workflows/ci.yml which is what GitHub Actions uses.

Then, you can commit those two files and push to GitHub. GitHub Actions should launch the tests.

After you have finished, don't forget to remove any changes you have made to ci.yml.

Although you are welcome to use CI, just be conscientious that this is a shared resource with limited concurrency. Try not to enable too many jobs at once (one or two should be sufficient in most cases).