The Zen of Auto Rspec
15 comments Latest by Birmingham Moving Company Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:18:21 GMT
Several months ago, I heard that people were using a program called autotest to have their tests continue to run as you made changes to your code base, which comes with ZenTest. It’s a really nice tool written by Ryan Davis and I hadn’t gotten a chance to play with it as of yet. Well, our team isn’t spending too much time in the test/ directory these days as we jumped ship near the end of last summer and found ourselves hanging out on the Isle of BDD. The locals are quite thoughtful about these sorts of things.
I just started working on a project that has been under development for several months and as I’m getting to learn the ins/outs of the system, I find myself having to rerun the specs, which can take quite a bit of time watching. Watching your specs or tests run sometimes is as productive as watching your code compile. Oddly enough, this is as close to compilation as we really get when working with Ruby on Rails… and it’s a productivity killer for me.
There Must Be a Better Way!
So, I did a quick google search and found an announcement for Rails that ran specs through ZenTest. This was exactly what I was searching for!
Some requirements
Please makes sure that you have the following gems installed in your development environment as they are dependencies to make this all work.
- zentest
- diff-lcs
$ sudo gem install zentest diff-lcs
note I’m going to assume that you have rspec and rspec for rails installed… if not… tsk. ;-)
Install RSpec autotest
$ script/plugin install http://svn.caldersphere.net/svn/main/plugins/rspec_autotest
If you’re using subversion, you might consider installing it as an external.
$ script/plugin install -x http://svn.caldersphere.net/svn/main/plugins/rspec_autotest
Running RSpec autotest
This is where it gets tricky. ;-)
$ rake spec:autotest
Now, you can keep a terminal window open and autotest will watch your application and detect when files change. When they change, it’ll attempt to rerun your specs (specifically those that changed). This helps save you the time of having to rerun all your specs throughout the development process and keep your spec:all sanity checks for when you’re about to commit code to your repository.
I’ll post another entry in the next few days to show you how you can use Growl with RSpec Autotest to keep you from having to look at your terminal all the time.
Until then… have fun!
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This is excellent! I took time over the holidays to start diving into rspec and amazed at how quickly I changed how I was thinking about the problems that I’m solving.
I can see this being very useful when your application size grows. Thanks for the tip!
Head into rspec_autotest.rb and change the command to drbspec and combine it with the server for much better performance.
Head into rspec_autotest.rb and change the command to drbspec and combine it with the server for much better performance.
Thank you so much for posting this! I easily saved a half hour of my day by not rerunning tests all the time. I had my terminal running and my textmate alongside and it was simply wonderful. :-)
Have you tried to do anything like this with JRuby?
Have you tried to do anything like this with JRuby?
nice article… what is up with all the porn names in the comments though?
I am having troubles getting auto rspec running on Windows. First I discovered that I had to define a HOME environment variable – see this post: http://groups.google.de/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/thread/b351f7fa101ff9f6
But now I am receiving a format error: “rake aborted! Exec format error – spec—diff unified spec/models/education_level_spec.rb spec/models/activities_lung_sound_spec.rb spec/models/case_status_spec.rb spec/models/danger_sign_spec.rb spec/models/employment_status_spec.rb spec/models/closure_reason_spec.rb spec/models/activity_spec.rb spec/models/activities_intervention_spec.rb”
I am Using: WinXP SP2 zentest version 3.6.0 rspec version 1.0.5 diff-lcs version 1.1.2 rails version 1.1.2
Has anyone else come across this issue?
This is very good! Thanks for the post !
Where do you set the HOMe environment variable? I cn’t find File.expand_path. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.
Very nice article…Thanks!
I too am having the same problem Ben was having; the “exec format error”. I also am running windows. I have seen other folks on forums with the same issue, but no one has offered any suggestions that work for me (eg update zentest, using script/spec instead of just spec and trying spec.cmd instead of just spec). When I type
spec—diff unified test/test_helper.rb
into the console directly, there seems to be no problem; it only occurs when this line is run via the rake task. Any suggestions would be appreciated… (it seems a little odd that it is not looking for my other test files, just the test_helper.rb)
cheers, charles de b
Thanx For sharing ur greeat stuff
How lucky I found this post! I am just looking information to solve the same problem. Thanks for your post. It’s really helpful.
Nice Post . I liked the way you started and compiled the ending of your article.
Good Job Done!!!