Clojure: Expectations Before Run Hook

The expectations library now supports calling an arbitrary number of custom functions before the test suite is run.

There are several reasons that you might want to call a custom function before the test suite is executed-

• load sample data to a database
• delete a temp directory
• replace logging with standard out or /dev/null

As of version 1.4.24, expectations will execute any function that includes the following metadata {:expectations-options :before-run}. The following example should serve as a decent reference on how to add your own 'before-run' functions.


These functions can be defined anywhere; however, expectations looks in a default location for a configuration file. If expectations finds this configuration file it removes (what should be) the namespace and requires it with :reload. As a result, this configuration namespace will be removed and redefined with each expectations suite run.

The name of this default configuration file is expectations_options.clj (thus the namespace is expectations-options). Expectations looks for this file in the root test directory. If you have :test-paths ["test/clojure"] in your project.clj, then you'll want to create test/clojure/expectations_options.clj.

If you place your expectations_options.clj file in the correct location and you add the {:expectations-options :before-run} metadata to a function in the expectations-options namespace, your function should be run automatically the next time your test suite runs. You may want to start with a (println) just to verify that things are going as you expect.