CDash integrates a self-testing framework based on Simple Test. The self testing code is located in the CDash/testing directory.

CDash testing requires the use of CMake and CTest. You can download the CMake suite of tools from www.cmake.org. CDash testing works much the same as any other CMake based project.

Checkout the CDash source code

See Downloading CDash for instructions on obtaining a copy of the CDash source code from subversion. During this step you should decide whether you want to test the latest release of CDash or the current development version.

No matter which version of CDash you choose to test, make sure to check out the source code into your web server's htdocs folder.

Setup CDash for testing

Create a build directory

cd /path/to/CDashTesting
mkdir build

Run CMake from the build directory

cd build
cmake ..

Define CMake variables

CDASH_DB_HOST
CDASH_DB_LOGIN
CDASH_DB_PASS
CDASH_DB_TYPE

These four parameters tell CDash how to connect to your local database server.

CDASH_SERVER

CDASH_SERVER should indicate how to connect to your local system via a web browser. This is typically the system's host name, or simply localhost.

CDASH_USE_APACHE2

Setting this to ON will enable tests specific to the Apache web server.

CDASH_USE_SELENIUM
PHPUNIT_EXE

Setting these options will enable testing of javascript based functionality of CDash. Requires selenium and PHPUnit. More on this below.

CMake_SOURCE_DIR

Point this to a local checkout of CMake source code if you'd like to import some tests from CMake into CDash. This will cause CDash to perform a more thorough end-to-end test of the CMake/CTest/CDash suite of tools.

PHP_EXE

CDash testing requires a command-line version of PHP to be installed on the system.

Test CDash

This is as simple as entering your CDash build directory and running CTest

 cd /path/to/CDashTesting/build
 ctest -VV

Note this will create CDashTesting/cdash/config.local.php and CDashTesting/testing/config.test.local.php files in your source tree, so svn will show them as ? files.