Linkcheck your Grails application as part of your funcational test

Canoo WebTest author Dierk König pointed out to me that you can use Webtest which is well integrated with Grails to link check your site locally. This is a must-have functional test to include before deploying.

All you need to do is get webtest setup for your project by running

grails generate-webtest

It will prompt you for a domain class name – put any one of your class names in there, it doesn’t matter. You can delete the generated test afterwards.

After this is done all you need to do is add a test that does the link checking to ./webtest/tests:

class LinkTest extends grails.util.WebTest {    void suite() {        testLinks()        // add tests for more operations here    }

    def testLinks = {        webtest('Link checker') {            invoke(url:'/')            verifyLinks(depth:5, onsiteonly:true)        }    }}

Then you just run the test:

grails run-webtest

…and then check the HTML report in webtest/reports

It would be great if we can get an integrated "release" Grails script that will provide the full workflow for releasing a new site version, including:

1. Run unit tests
2. If these pass, run functional tests
3. If these pass, do full linkcheck
4. If still going OK, increment version number
5. Package into a .WAR

It would be very nice. A fair bit of work involved though.