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Documentation for 3.24
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Install Texttest
The first part is clearly to download TextTest itself from the sourceforge project page.. You can then unzip this anywhere and run it from that location. The download is fairly large as it includes TextTest's tests for itself, which are useful as a tool for understanding features by example.
On Windows, there is now a Windows installer there. This will install everything you need and set TEXTTEST_HOME (see below) to C:\tests. As this change doesn't take effect until you log out and log in again, it's suggested you do that for the moment. The Windows instructions below are in case you need to install the component parts at all.
Compulsory dependencies
  1. Python. You will need at least version 2.6. Note that most Linux installations come with Python pre-installed.
  2. PyGTK. TextTest's GUI makes use of PyGTK, which is a thin wrapper around the C GUI library GTK. You will need at least GTK 2.18 and an equivalent version of PyGTK. All development is currently being done against GTK 2.18 and PyGTK 2.16.
    3. Note that most Linux installations include a PyGTK package and some (e.g. Ubuntu) have it installed by default. To test whether your Python installation already includes PyGTK, type 'import gtk' into a python prompt. No response means you do. However, this can be a curse as well as a blessing, because if you have an older "enterprise" linux platform such as Red Hat or SuSE, it's difficult to put a newer GTK in place than the default. In this case you should refer to the instructions under doc/Upgrade_PyGTK_Enterprise_Linux in the TextTest download.
    On Windows, the summary for how to install is that you should get the GTK 2.18 bundle from here, unzip it somewhere (avoid locations with spaces in their names, I find "C:\Gtk" works just fine for me!), add its "bin" subdirectory to your PATH and then run the three installers at the top of the PyGTK downloads page. In general neither TextTest nor PyGTK handle paths with spaces in their names well: both are ports of software written on UNIX so you're well advised to steer clear of "Program Files" and "Documents and Settings", whatever your Windows best-practice manual may tell you...
    On the Mac, some hints can be found on the PyGTK FAQ. Basically PyGTK doesn't build natively for the Mac so you should install Apple's Xll server. This implies installing the Developer Tools, XQuartz and then Macports, before getting PyGTK by executing "port install py26-gtk". Note that this may take quite some time to complete.
  3. Tkdiff and diff. You will need a decent graphical difference tool on your PATH, along with a textual version for reports. We recommend 'tkdiff' and 'diff' respectively which are present on most UNIX systems and are TextTest's defaults. If you're on UNIX and tkdiff isn't there, download from tkdiff's project page on sourceforge.
    4. On Windows, Patrick Finnegan sent me a very nice Windows installer for tkdiff and diff and kindly agreed that I could distribute it here. Note that the installer won't affect your path though, so you'll need to set PATH in autoexec.bat or similar to include wherever it's installed (typcially something like C:\Program Files\tkdiff)
    On the Mac you can get it via Macports in a similar way to PyGTK, i.e. "port install tkdiff".
  4. Emacs and notepad. TextTest also makes use of a generic editor for viewing files. This defaults to "emacs" on UNIX systems and "notepad" on Windows, which are both likely to be pre-installed. Your UNIX installation will certainly have a package for "emacs" if not. It's easy to change these to use other editors if desired via the "view_program" configuration setting.
Things you might want to install...
For viewing test files while they are running, there is a menu option to display a window with live updates of the file. On UNIX this defaults to using 'xterm -e tail -f'. On Windows there is a nice equivalent called baretail which is TextTest's default. You can download it from Bare Metal Software's site. Like everything else you should add it to your PATH. Naturally, there is no compulsion to use this functionality so this download is optional. Selecting it on Windows will just produce an error dialog if “baretail” can't be found.
Things you need to set...
TextTest uses a root directory where it starts to look for tests, determined primarily by the environment variable TEXTTEST_HOME. This is the first thing determined by TextTest on being called and not much will happen if it isn't set.
You are strongly recommended to pick an existing root directory for all your tests and set TEXTTEST_HOME to this directory in some persistent way (for example your shell starter script on UNIX or autoexec.bat on Windows). In this way you will not need to think about it more than once.


Last updated: 05 October 2012
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