Controlling the Life Cycle of OTP Processes in Tests
Until now, when we needed to start a GenServer in our tests, we always called the GenServer’s start_link/1 function directly. We even went as far as having assertions on the return value of this function.
| | assert {:ok, pid} = RollingAverageServer.start_link(max_measurements: n) |
This kind of assertion might be useful to test that the start_link/1 function behaves properly, but it has a few drawbacks. The most important one is that the process that we start is tied to the life cycle of the test process but not in a clean way. The processes are just linked. When the test finishes executing, the test process will terminate (peacefully); and since our GenServer process is linked to it, the ...
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