I use prove from Test::Harness to test the code of my Perl projects. The program prove runs tests files and summarizes the output. If tests fail then it shows the error in its output.

The problem is, my defaults aren’t the same as the defaults that prove uses. I keep my main application files in app/lib and a few vendor libraries in vendor. The problem with this is that I have type out the options of prove every time I wanted to test. For the longest time I used a Makefile to solve this problem.

Then I found out about .proverc. If you put this file in your current directory of in your home directory, then prove will use each line as an extra command-line option.

The .proverc in the root dir of my project looks like this:

-Iapp/lib
-Ivendor
-r

It includes two extra directories in the Perl include path; app/lib and vendor. It also find all test files recursively in the t directory, which is also not a default setting of prove.