Files and Folders Structure

Prancer project directory

The files to operate Prancer should be put into a project directory. It is recommended to have a source control mechanism for this folder to keep track of changes. All the Prancer files should be stored in a sub-directory of your choice, we recommend something like tests/prancer/. To create it, you can run something like:

mkdir -p tests/prancer
cd tests/prancer

Most of these folder names and locations are configurable in config.ini file.

Validation directory

The validation directory is the internal working directory for Prancer. This is where snapshot config files and tests will be created. All of them will be written inside a sub-directory of validation. Create the validation directory using:

mkdir -p validation

Under the validation directory lives Collection directories. Each collection is a logical grouping for your test files and snapshot configuration files. Their sole purpose is to group and create a hierarchy to organize your tests better. Create a Collection directory like so:

mkdir -p validation/container1

You can create as many as needed, and there is no specific naming convention. The only prerequisite is to respect your filesystem's requirements.

Project configuration file

At the root of the Prancer project directory, you will be putting the config.ini file that tells Prancer how to behave for the current project. The configuration of Prancer is detailed in the next section. It consists of sections and key-value pairs, just like in any INI files. Here is an example:

[section]
key = value
key = value

[section2]
key = value
key = value

Look at the following sections to understand what you can put in this file.

Reporting folder

Prancer requires you to specify a path where output files should be stored after running tests. You can use the same directory as your TESTS, but it will create a separate structure if you don't. Depending on your artifact-building approach, you might want to split them or keep them together.

Collection folder

Prancer requires you to specify where your snapshot configuration files and test files are when using the filesystem storage-based approach. This section of the configuration defines where to find those files.

Snapshot folder

When you are using Filesystem to store the result of snapshots, Prancer creates a folder inside the collection to store the snapshots.