How to load GZF files inside a test of a Ghidra Extension

[fmagin]

I'm developing extensions in stand-alone repositories. Testing via subclasses of AbstractGhidraHeadedIntegrationTest generally works, but one problem I'm currently struggling with is elegantly loading .gzf Files that are stored somewhere in the repository to get a Program instance.

In theory there is a nice API for this:

var env = new TestEnv()
var program = env.getProgram("someProgramName")

In practice TestEnv#getProgram seems to rely on the existence of a TestResources module in the application root, which doesn't exist when running a Ghidra release with an extension loaded.

GhidraApplicationLayout#findGhidraModules allows adding external modules via a ghidra.external.modules property, but GhidraTestApplicationLayout#findGhidraModules does not.

Is there some way to have a dedicated folder for GZF files in my extension, that I can easily load from, but that is also not shipped as part of the plugin when building the extension?

[dragonmacher]

We can possibly add some code to our test application to make this easier. For now I will describe how you can make this work in your environment using the concept we refer to as a shadow repo. We take advantage of this in dev mode. Our repo has various modules that we discover at load time. If you have defined any peer repos, we will search for any same-named module in all of the sibling repos. In this example, our 'ghidra' repo has the path: ghidra/Ghidra/Test/TestResources already. If you have a shadow repo that also has that path, it will be included in the search for test data. This is currently how we do it.

The notes below are based upon our setup, with our repo, which I refer to as 'ghidra'. I'm not sure exactly how you have your repo setup, so the steps my need to be changed a bit.

Create a Shadow Repo

Create a repo for test files that contains all of your test data. This new test repo can be shared by your various dev repos by checking it out as a sibling repo anywhere you have your dev repo. This repo should contain the same path as above, with a data folder: {root}/Ghidra/Test/TestResources/data. Add a gzf to the data folder or to a sub-folder under data, such as:

{root}/Ghidra/Test/TestResources/data/MyCoolBinary.gzf
{root}/Ghidra/Test/TestResources/data/some/other/path/Foo.gzf

These can then be accessed in your test like this:

var env = new TestEnv()
var program = env.getProgram("MyCoolBinary.gzf") // .gzf suffix is not required

and

var env = new TestEnv()
var program = env.getProgram("some/other/path/Foo.gzf") // .gzf suffix is not required

Use the Shadow Repo

Checkout the test repo as a sibling to your repo, for example:

/home/bob/git/ghidra_dev_root/
                ghidra/
                test.repo.name/

(In this example 'ghidra' is our repo and 'test.repo.name' is the test data repo).

To have ghidra use this repo, you need to create a file that lives in the ghidra repo named ghidra.repos.config. This file should have one line for each other non-ghidra repo you wish to use. In this example, you need this line:

test.repo.name

This is the folder name of the repo root folder that is the sibling to our 'ghidra' repo.

When you run your tests, they should then pick up the shadow module in the test repo.