Test-suite

As a testing framework, consider catch2 and GoogleTest for their good CMake compatibility. Here we will focus on the overall test-suite design and CMake native testing.

As a subproject

One useful design is to make the test-suite as a subproject. This makes it possible to run the tests post-installation, e.g. for conda or Fedora packaging. Depending on how the tests are imported, some unit-tests or packaging test would have to be excluded.

Define <Project>_add_test

For functional and packaging tests, it can be useful to define a <Project>_add_test helper function wrapping around ctest --build-and-test, which makes sure we import the main project appropriately. This is particularly useful for testing libraries and examples as self-contained CMake projects.

Packaging tests

A specific use-case of <Project>_add_test is to test the packaging and importing of the project. This template covers testing FetchContent, find_package, and PkgConfig.