Bats Testing Patterns

If you're writing shell scripts for production, you need tests, and this skill shows you how to build them with Bats. It covers the essentials like setup/teardown patterns, output assertions, and mocking external commands. The examples are practical: testing exit codes, validating file operations, stubbing curl calls, and managing test fixtures. Bats integrates cleanly with CI/CD pipelines and outputs TAP format, so your shell script tests work alongside the rest of your test suite. The fixture management and mocking patterns alone will save you hours of debugging flaky tests.

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last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add wshobson/agents --skill bats-testing-patterns --agent claude-code

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Files

Bats Testing Patterns

Comprehensive guidance for writing comprehensive unit tests for shell scripts using Bats (Bash Automated Testing System), including test patterns, fixtures, and best practices for production-grade shell testing.

When to Use This Skill

Writing unit tests for shell scripts
Implementing test-driven development (TDD) for scripts
Setting up automated testing in CI/CD pipelines
Testing edge cases and error conditions
Validating behavior across different shell environments
Building maintainable test suites for scripts
Creating fixtures for complex test scenarios
Testing multiple shell dialects (bash, sh, dash)

Detailed patterns and worked examples

Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md. Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient.

Testing Error Conditions

#!/usr/bin/env bats

@test "Function fails with missing file" {
    run my_function "/nonexistent/file.txt"
    [ "$status" -ne 0 ]
    [[ "$output" == *"not found"* ]]
}

@test "Function fails with invalid input" {
    run my_function ""
    [ "$status" -ne 0 ]
}

SKILL.md on GitHub