Auto RSpec

Nick Sieger — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 20:35:00 +0000

Update: (2 months later) If you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in my Rails plugin for this instead.

Hot off the presses, after a few hours of hacking and tweaking, may I present Auto+RSpec, otherwise known as The Mashup of RSpec on Rails and autotest. This is not an official release of any sort, but “may work for you.” It’s not a clean hack, as it exposes some areas for autotest to grow if the maintainers decide to open it up to alternatives to Test::Unit. After spending a little time looking at the autotest code, I think it would be nice to allow hooks for autotest plugins to define project conventions (i.e., @exceptions and the #tests_for_file method) as well as a result parsing API.

For now, if you’re an RSpec on Rails user, you can try this out as follows:

Install ZenTest if you haven’t already: sudo gem install ZenTest.
Download rspec_autotest.rb and put in your vendor/plugins/rspec/lib directory (you did say you’re using RSpec on Rails didn’t you?)
Download rspec_autotest.rake and put in your lib/tasks directory
Start autotest with rake by typing rake spec:autotest
Note: if you’re using RSpec 0.6, you might have better success with the files located here.

Next steps for this will be to work out whether this code should live in RSpec on Rails or autotest, or some combination of those.

Now, spec’ers, be off in search of that Red/Green/Refactor rhythm of which sage agilists speak!

Bonus tip: add the following code to your .autotest file to run spec with rcov:

  Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |at|
    # run spec with rcov
    if at.respond_to? :spec_command
      at.spec_command = %{rcov --exclude "lib/spec/.*" -Ilib --rails "/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rspec-0.6.0/bin/spec" -- --diff}
    end
  end

Nick Sieger: Category testing

Auto RSpec