Nix, cabal, and tests

I found mentions of this mentioned in an open cabal ticket and someone even made a git repo to explore it. I posted a question on the Nix discorse.

Basically, when running cabal test in a dev shell, started with nix develop, the tool hspec-discover wasn't found. At the same time the packages was installed

(ins)$ ghc-pkg list | rg hspec
    hspec-2.9.7
    hspec-core-2.9.7
    (hspec-discover-2.9.7)
    hspec-expectations-0.8.2

and it was on the $PATH

(ins)$ whereis hspec-discover
hspec-discover: /nix/store/vaq3gvak92whk5l169r06xrbkx6c0lqp-ghc-9.2.8-with-packages/bin/hspec-discover /nix/store/986bnyyhmi042kg4v6d918hli32lh9dw-hspec-discover-2.9.7/bin/hspec-discover

The solution, as the user julm pointed out, is to simply do what cabal tells you and run cabal update first.

The project's tests were set up in such a way that standalone tests and integration tests are mixed into the same test executable. As the integration tests need the just built service to be running they can't be run during nix build. However, the only way of preventing that, without making code changes, is to pass an argument to the test executable, --skip=<prefix>, and I believe that's not possible when using developPackage. It's not a big deal though, it's perfectly fine to run the tests separately using nix develop . command .... However, it turns out developPackage and the underlying machinery is smart enough to skip installing package required for testing when it's turned off (using dontCheck). This is the case also when returnShellEnv is true.

Luckily it's not too difficult to deal with it. I already had a variable isDevShell so I could simply reuse it and add the following expression to modifier

(if isDevShell then hl.doCheck else hl.dontCheck)