Dis-/ Enable parallel testing locally

[markschat]

I divided my tests into several subcategories as Unit, Integration, ...
testthis is a great package leaveraging testthat to run every category by its own.

I would like to achieve the following behaviour:

• Unit-Tests (and alike): disable parallel testing (fast execution -> no need for parallel execution)
• Integration-Tests: enable parallel testing

As of now I only aware of enabling parallel testing within the DESCRIPTION file globaly. Is there a possible way to achieve this distinction?

[gaborcsardi]

I think the only way to achieve this is to have two test suites, and turn on/off parallel testing when they are started, via the env var (see docs).

When using them outside of R CMD check you would need to run the test suite that is not in tests/testthat with

testthat::test_dir("tests/othertests")

[markschat]

@gaborcsardi Thanks for the hint! Could you specify where to find the "env var switch"-Section within the docs? So far I only read about adding some lines to the DESCRIPTION file.

[gaborcsardi]

Apologies if it is not the docs, you need to set the TESTTHAT_PARALLEL env var to either TRUE or FALSE.

[markschat]

Exactly what I was looking for 😀 - thanks a lot! The docs seems to be missing this detail though.

Here´s a short example for posterity using devtools & testthis:

Sys.setenv("TESTTHAT_PARALLEL" = "FALSE")
devtools::test() # run all unit-tests within /testthat (in current process)

Sys.setenv("TESTTHAT_PARALLEL" = "TRUE")
testthis::test_integration() # run all integration-tests within /testthat/integration_tests (in parallel)

Sys.setenv("TESTTHAT_PARALLEL" = "") # clean up

Note that testthis::test_integration currently fails but hopefully will soon be fixed.
Use testthat::test_dir() in the meantime as proposed by @gaborcsardi.