I am working on (yet another) Julia wrapper for cmdstan. The user would need to install it separately to use the wrapper, but I am not sure how to unit test this setup.
I am using Travis, and I could make the test script download and compile cmdstan each time it is run, but this is time-consuming and an unnecessary waste of resources. So I am wondering if there are (unofficial) linux binary distributions for cmdstan that I could just grab for automated testing, eg as a byproduct of a buildbot.
Not that I know of, but @seantalts should know. The problem I foresee is that they’d have to be binary compatible with whatever else you have.
As far as I know, the only thing that gets compiled in CmdStan is the parser (and maybe the CVODES library for ODE solving). I think you’ll find if you cut the optimization level down, it’ll go a lot faster rebuilding while you test. We can’t do that on Windows because the toolchain blows up with too much debug info at -O0 optimization levels, but it’s no problem on the Mac or Linux.
Figured it out: Travis can cache the CmdStan repo and compiled stanc. Relevant lines from .travis.yml:
cache:
directories:
- $HOME/cmdstan
will cache the directory, and
script:
- if [[ -a .git/shallow ]]; then git fetch --unshallow; fi
- cd $HOME; if [[ ! -d cmdstan ]]; then git clone https://github.com/stan-dev/cmdstan.git; fi
- cd $HOME/cmdstan; git checkout v2.15.0; make stan-update; make build
- export CMDSTAN_HOME=$HOME/cmdstan
- cd $TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR
will pull and build it for the first time (and only then). Should be followed by repo-specific test commands.
That depends — in case the cacheable stuff is significant, I would consider it. I mainly did it because for me compiling CmdStan and the dependencies dominated test runtimes.