Testing with Bats

Overview

Bats is best when correctness depends on real shell behavior: exit codes, stdout/stderr, sourced functions, and external commands.

Core principle: test behavior at the shell boundary, not implementation details.

When to Use

Use this skill when you need to:

• Write e2e tests for CLI tools
• Test Bash libraries that are sourced (not executed)
• Use Bats as a shell-native REST API test runner with curl + jq

Typical symptoms: