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RapidCheck property-based testing for Bitcoin Core

Concept

Property-based testing is experimentally being added to Bitcoin Core with RapidCheck, a C++ framework for property-based testing inspired by the Haskell library QuickCheck.

RapidCheck performs random testing of program properties. A specification of the program is given in the form of properties which functions should satisfy, and RapidCheck tests that the properties hold in a large number of randomly generated cases.

If an exception is found, RapidCheck tries to find the smallest case, for some definition of smallest, for which the property is still false and displays it as a counter-example. For example, if the input is an integer, RapidCheck tries to find the smallest integer for which the property is false.

Running

If RapidCheck is installed, Bitcoin Core will automatically run the property-based tests with the unit tests during make check, unless the --without-rapidcheck flag is passed when configuring.

For more information, run ./configure --help and see --with-rapidcheck under Optional Packages.

Setup

The following instructions have been tested with Linux Debian and macOS.

  1. Clone the RapidCheck source code and cd into the repository.

    git clone https://github.com/emil-e/rapidcheck.git
cd rapidcheck

  2. Build RapidCheck (requires CMake to be installed).

    cmake -DCMAKE_POSITION_INDEPENDENT_CODE:BOOL=true -DRC_ENABLE_BOOST_TEST=ON $(pwd)
make && make install

  3. Configure Bitcoin Core with RapidCheck.

    cd to the directory of your local bitcoin repository and run ./configure. In the output you should see:

    checking rapidcheck.h usability... yes
checking rapidcheck.h presence... yes
checking for rapidcheck.h... yes
[...]
Options used to compile and link:
[...]
  with test     = yes
    with prop   = yes

  4. Build Bitcoin Core with RapidCheck.

    Now you can run make and should see the property-based tests compiled with the unit tests:

    Making all in src
[...]
CXX      test/gen/test_bitcoin-crypto_gen.o
CXX      test/test_bitcoin-key_properties.o

  5. Run the unit tests with make check. The property-based tests will be run with the unit tests.

    Running tests: crypto_tests from test/crypto_tests.cpp
[...]
Running tests: key_properties from test/key_properties.cpp

That's it! You are now running property-based tests in Bitcoin Core.