About

The Arbitrary crate lets you construct arbitrary instance of a type.

This crate is primarily intended to be combined with a fuzzer like libFuzzer and cargo-fuzz or AFL, and to help you turn the raw, untyped byte buffers that they produce into well-typed, valid, structured values. This allows you to combine structure-aware test case generation with coverage-guided, mutation-based fuzzers.

Documentation

Read the API documentation on docs.rs!

Example

Say you're writing a color conversion library, and you have an Rgb struct to represent RGB colors. You might want to implement Arbitrary for Rgb so that you could take arbitrary Rgb instances in a test function that asserts some property (for example, asserting that RGB converted to HSL and converted back to RGB always ends up exactly where we started).

Automatically Deriving Arbitrary

Automatically deriving the Arbitrary trait is the recommended way to implement Arbitrary for your types.

Automatically deriving Arbitrary requires you to enable the "derive" cargo feature:

# Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
arbitrary = { version = "0.3.1", features = ["derive"] }

And then you can simply add #[derive(Arbitrary)] annotations to your types:

// rgb.rs

use arbitrary::Arbitrary;

#[derive(Arbitrary)]
pub struct Rgb {
    pub r: u8,
    pub g: u8,
    pub b: u8,
}

Implementing Arbitrary By Hand

Alternatively, you can write an Arbitrary implementation by hand:

// rgb.rs

use arbitrary::{Arbitrary, Result, Unstructured};

#[derive(Copy, Clone, Debug)]
pub struct Rgb {
    pub r: u8,
    pub g: u8,
    pub b: u8,
}

impl Arbitrary for Rgb {
    fn arbitrary(u: &mut Unstructured<'_>) -> Result<Self> {
        let r = u8::arbitrary(u)?;
        let g = u8::arbitrary(u)?;
        let b = u8::arbitrary(u)?;
        Ok(Rgb { r, g, b })
    }
}

Shrinking

To assist with test case reduction, where you want to find the smallest and most easily understandable test case that still demonstrates a bug you've discovered, the Arbitrary trait has a shrink method. The shrink method returns an iterator of “smaller” instances of self. The provided, default implementation returns an empty iterator.

We can override the default for our Rgb struct above by shrinking each of its components and then gluing them back together again:

impl Arbitrary for Rgb {
    // ...

    fn shrink(&self) -> Box<dyn Iterator<Item = Self>> {
        let rs = self.r.shrink();
        let gs = self.g.shrink();
        let bs = self.b.shrink();
        Box::new(rs.zip(gs).zip(bs).map(|((r, g), b)| Rgb { r, g, b }))
    }
}

Note that deriving Arbitrary will automatically derive a custom shrink implementation for you.

License

Licensed under dual MIT or Apache-2.0 at your choice.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this project by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.