Comments on: Continuous Testing and Testing Single Methods in Ruby on Rails

By: rubencaro

rubencaro — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 09:17:45 +0000

I prefer your rake task (slightly modified to suit my needs) over autotest, at least until autotest becomes more stable.

It does exactly what I want it to do, while autotest sometimes goes crazy and fires when nothing changed, or directly exits instead of stay there waiting…

You can place it on a github repo! I will place my version of this great rake task there.

Thanks.

By: grosser

grosser — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 07:51:29 +0000

Yes autotest runs all files, but only on the first run/after an error was fixed. I still do not like this behavior since the whole test suite takes ages. Ill either merge your monitor somehow or read through autotest, maybe it has an option that does this.

By: science

science — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:39:07 +0000

My test monitor will only run a single test whenever it detects a change. I think that is different from autotest, which runs the entire test suite whenever any file is changed? My system just looks in the test folder for any *_test file that is updated. When it finds one, it runs just that single file..

Maybe that would be useful in your system? Feel free to poach that code if you want.

By: grosser

grosser — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:22:40 +0000

yep, rake eats them all, app:test:file:users_t or app:test:file f=users_t will work (app:test:file[users_t] could work too, but im not sure)

i am doing exact match with the single_test plugin, but i also like the possibility to run multiple tests with e.g. users*, maybe there is a nice syntax to do them both…

what i also would like to do is monitoring of a single file, so that only it is rerun every time, which keeps tests fast and is as comfortable as autotest, but maybe hacking autotest is the better solution for this.

By: science

science — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:44:09 +0000

Grosser: Thanks for the input. I agree the “file=” syntax is weird, but my experience is that rake eats my parameters unless I put an “=” in them. Maybe just me – input welcome.

This system does permit testing a single file in just the way you describe – if you only want to test “users_test” and not “users_controller_test” you would type:

rake app:test:file file=users_t

I think the feature where you want to test all tests related to users is kind of nice, which is accomplished by typing this:

rake app:test:file file=users

But perhaps if an exact match on the search string is found (i.e. “users” is typed and “users_test.rb” is found), then only that test should be run?

By: grosser

grosser — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:40:19 +0000

nice tasks for running single tests, the goal of my single_test plugin is a bit different, to only run one file, so e.g. rake spec:user would run user_spec.rb and nothing else

http://github.com/grosser/single_test/

but this approach has its advantages, e.g. simpler logic/all user_* tests are run which sometimes is ok since when changing user i also want to test users_controller/users_helper

id remove the file=, since it seems redundant to me

the _test/_test.rb syntax seems strange to me, why would i ever type out _test.rb when i got a library to take care of it. Id reduce it to #{pattern}*, and then remove any files that do not end in _test.rb (if a user wants user_test.rb but not users_controll… he can simply use user_t and it should only find one)

and the monitor task can be done with autotest/autospec, no need to roll your own :)