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13621 :: How to enable features when running `nimble test`

• hyu1996 (orginal) [2026-01-06T08:16:43+01:00] view original

  Hi everyone,

  I have features like sokol defined in my .nimble file (as shown below), and I need to know how to enable the sokol feature when executing nimble test:

  
  feature "sokol":
    requires "sokol >= 0.6.0"
  
  feature "opengl":
    requires "opengl >= 1.2.9"
  
  feature "dev":
    requires "sdl2 >= 2.0.5"
  Run

  Are there specific flags or syntax for enabling features during nimble test? Any official docs on this would also be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

  https://nim-lang.github.io/nimble/create-packages.html#features-experimental

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• hmf (orginal) [2026-01-06T09:06:22+01:00] view original

  Maybe you can use the dev feature? It states:

  An implicit feature, dev, is always activated when developing a package. It is useful for requiring development-specific dependencies.

  The example given is for testing.

  HTHs

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• hyu1996 (orginal) [2026-01-06T09:44:49+01:00] view original

  Thanks a lot for the tip!

  The dev feature does pull in the sokol dependency, but it doesn’t activate the feature.nvg.sokol flag.

  As a workaround, I’m planning to manually define this symbol for my test runs.

  
  # when feature is activated
  when defined(feature.nvg.sokol):
    import sokol
  Run

  
  # workaround, manually define this symbol
  > nimble --parser:declarative -d:feature.nvg.sokol test
  Run

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• treeform (orginal) [2026-01-06T12:41:00+01:00] view original

  Nimble does not support many of the flags that nim compiler supports. For this reason I just now call nim directly in my test scripts. I create a main plain nim test file that just uses all the little test files in the directory.

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