Running in a controlled environment

You can create and refine simulate sessions in your everyday interactive Emacs, but often you’ll want to run them in a minimal, reproducible environment, either for correctness (tests) or clarity (demos).

Preparing such environment may consist of:

  • setting a user-directory other than your .emacs.d
  • initializing the package system and downloading dependencies
  • adding local paths to the load-path
  • loading Director itself

As a convenience, you can copy util/director-bootstrap.el (opens in a new tab) to your project, and invoke director-bootstrap before director-run:

(director-bootstrap
 :user-dir "/tmp/my-package-test"
 :packages '(some-package-we-depend-on some-other-package)
 :load-path '("/path/to/director" ;; will move to :packages once director is on MELPA
              "/path/to/my/package")))

Load it before everything else with:

$ emacs -Q -nw -l director-bootstrap.el -l my-session-script.el

It would be nice if Director itself were able to provide bootstrapping, but since making Director available is part of the bootstrapping, there’s an obvious chicken-and-egg problem.

End-to-end testingDebugging