The-OpenROAD-Project_OpenROAD/docs/src/doc_check_tests.md

Documentation Check Tests

Overview

OpenROAD has lightweight documentation tests that validate consistency between source code, README files, and man pages. These tests are pure Python and run in seconds without building the OpenROAD binary.

Running the tests

# All documentation checks (~48 tests, seconds)
bazelisk test --test_tag_filters=doc_check //src/...

# Duplicate message ID check
bazelisk test //:dup_id_test

What gets tested

Per-module tests (24 modules)

Each module has two documentation tests:

• {module}_readme_msgs_check — Validates that README.md parses correctly into man2 format and messages.txt parses into man3 format.

• {module}_man_tcl_check — Validates that command counts match across help strings, proc definitions, and README documentation.

Repository-wide tests

• dup_id_test — Checks for duplicate logger message IDs across all source files using etc/find_messages.py.

How it works

The tests use the doc_check_test Bazel macro defined in test/regression.bzl. This is a lightweight variant of regression_test that does not depend on //:openroad, so no C++ compilation is triggered. All doc check tests are automatically tagged with doc_check, which allows tag-based discovery via --test_tag_filters=doc_check.

Each module's messages.txt is generated on-demand by the messages_txt macro (also in test/regression.bzl) that runs etc/find_messages.py over the module's source files using the Bazel Python toolchain.

Relationship to Jenkins

Jenkins runs "Documentation Checks" and "Find Duplicated Message IDs" as stages in the PR pipeline. These Bazel tests cover the same checks. Once this is validated in CI, the corresponding Jenkins stages can be removed:

• Jenkins "Documentation Checks" stage → bazelisk test --test_tag_filters=doc_check //src/...
• Jenkins "Find Duplicated Message IDs" stage → bazelisk test //:dup_id_test

Adding a new module

When adding documentation tests for a new module:

1. Add filegroup(name = "doc_files") and messages_txt() macro call to src/{module}/BUILD (load messages_txt from //test:regression.bzl)
2. Add doc_check_test entries to src/{module}/test/BUILD

The doc_check tag is automatically added by the macro, so --test_tag_filters=doc_check picks up new tests without any changes to the root BUILD.bazel.