How to organize Vector unit tests in a separate folder?

[Oyabi]

Hi,

I'm using Vector to process logs and send them to Graylog. I have multiple transform files written in YAML, and I want to write unit tests for each of them.

I initially added the tests directly inside each transform file, but since I have many files, I would prefer to move all tests into a separate folder (vector/tests/).

However, when I do this and run vector -C vector, I get the following error:

vector -C vector
2025-03-18T01:13:36.990371Z  INFO vector::app: Log level is enabled. level="info"
2025-03-18T01:13:36.991235Z  INFO vector::app: Loading configs. paths=["vector"]
2025-03-18T01:13:36.996554Z ERROR vector::cli: Configuration error. error=unknown field `tests`, expected one of `name`, `input`, `inputs`, `outputs`, `no_outputs_from`
in `apache`

Here the structure of my /etc/vector:

sinks/
sources/
tests/
transforms/
vector.yaml

Is there a recommended way to keep tests in a separate folder without causing conflicts with the main configuration?

I can maybe add them in my transforms but I don't found the right syntax. Here an example of transforms file that I use (/etc/vector/transforms/10_apache_combined.yaml):

inputs:
  - "apache_combined"
type: "remap"
source: |-
  . |= parse_apache_log!(.message, "combined")
  .tag = "apache.combined"

Thanks in advance!

[pront]

I initially added the tests directly inside each transform file, but since I have many files, I would prefer to move all tests into a separate folder (vector/tests/).

I don't think this is doable out of the box. A custom solution is to introduce some kind of include!(file_path) for your test files and copy paste the real config in place. E.g.

include!(../configs/a.yaml)

tests:
  # ...

Also, feel free to open a feature request.