Installation

Linux: Distribution Package Manager

Following Linux distributions provide Bats via their package manager:

Note: Bats versions pre 1.0 are from sstephenson’s original project. Consider using one of the other installation methods below to get the latest Bats release. The test matrix above only applies to the latest Bats version.

If your favorite distribution is not listed above, you can try one of the following package managers or install from source.

MacOS: Homebrew

On macOS, you can install Homebrew if you haven’t already, then run:

$ brew install bats-core

Any OS: npm

You can install the Bats npm package via:

# To install globally:
$ npm install -g bats

# To install into your project and save it as one of the "devDependencies" in
# your package.json:
$ npm install --save-dev bats

Any OS: Installing Bats from source

Check out a copy of the Bats repository. Then, either add the Bats bin directory to your $PATH, or run the provided install.sh command with the location to the prefix in which you want to install Bats. For example, to install Bats into /usr/local,

$ git clone https://github.com/bats-core/bats-core.git
$ cd bats-core
$ ./install.sh /usr/local

Note: You may need to run install.sh with sudo if you do not have permission to write to the installation prefix.

Windows: Installing Bats from source via Git Bash

Check out a copy of the Bats repository and install it to $HOME. This will place the bats executable in $HOME/bin, which should already be in $PATH.

$ git clone https://github.com/bats-core/bats-core.git
$ cd bats-core
$ ./install.sh $HOME

Running Bats in Docker

There is an official image on the Docker Hub:

$ docker run -it bats/bats:latest --version

Building a Docker image

Check out a copy of the Bats repository, then build a container image:

$ git clone https://github.com/bats-core/bats-core.git
$ cd bats-core
$ docker build --tag bats/bats:latest .

This creates a local Docker image called bats/bats:latest based on Alpine Linux (to push to private registries, tag it with another organisation, e.g. my-org/bats:latest).

To run Bats’ internal test suite (which is in the container image at /opt/bats/test):

$ docker run -it bats/bats:latest /opt/bats/test

To run a test suite from a directory called test in the current directory of your local machine, mount in a volume and direct Bats to its path inside the container:

$ docker run -it -v "${PWD}:/code" bats/bats:latest test

/code is the working directory of the Docker image. “${PWD}/test” is the location of the test directory on the local machine.

This is a minimal Docker image. If more tools are required this can be used as a base image in a Dockerfile using FROM <Docker image>. In the future there may be images based on Debian, and/or with more tools installed (curl and openssl, for example). If you require a specific configuration please search and +1 an issue or raise a new issue.

Further usage examples are in the wiki.