Getting Started with RSpec
One of the reasons that I love rails is the awesome test frameworks. Here’s an introduction for those of you interested in getting started with RSpec.
Everyone may know Behaviour Driven Development, It's an Agile development process that comprises aspects of Acceptance Test Driven Planning, Domain Driven Design and Test Driven Development. RSpec is a BDD tool aimed at TDD in the context of BDD.
Here is my gemfile.
#gemfile
# mongo support
gem 'mongo', '~> 1.3.1'
gem 'mongoid', '~> 2.3.3'
gem 'bson', '~> 1.3.1'
gem 'bson_ext', '~> 1.3.1'
group :development, :test do
gem 'machinist', '~> 2.0.0.beta2'
gem 'machinist_mongo', :git => 'https://github.com/nmerouze/machinist_mongo.git', :require => 'machinist/mongoid', :branch => 'machinist2' # you need to add this if you are using mongoid
gem 'database_cleaner', '~> 0.6.7'
gem 'ffaker', '~> 1.8.1'
gem 'launchy'
gem 'guard-rspec'
end
group :test do
gem 'rspec', '~> 2.7.0'
gem 'rspec-rails', '~> 2.7.0'
gem 'mongoid-rspec', '~> 1.4.4'
gem 'spork', '~> 0.8.5'
gem 'cucumber-rails', '~> 1.2.0'
gem 'capybara', '~> 1.1.1'
gem 'email_spec'
gem 'simplecov', :require => false
gem 'rb-fsevent', :require => false
gem 'growl_notify'
end
In this gemfile, I add two gems 'machinist_mongo and 'mongoid-rspec' because of I'm using Mongoid in my project, if you are using activerecord, just remove these two gems.
Installation
Just Run bundle to install all the gems listed in gemfile
RSpec works great with other assistant plugins as I listed above, I will introduce you one by one.
RSpec
Someone would say that unit testing framework is good enough, but what I would say is that RSpec is a Domain Specific Language for describing the expected behaviour of a system with executable examples.
Configuration
Initialize Rspec
$ rails g rspec:install
It will generate files and directories as below
create .rspec
create spec
create spec/spec_helper.rb
Let's modify spec_helper.rb to extend some awesome tools
require 'rubygems'
require 'simplecov'
require 'spork'
SimpleCov.start 'rails'
# This file is copied to spec/ when you run 'rails generate rspec:install'
ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'test'
require 'rails/mongoid'
Spork.trap_class_method(Rails::Mongoid, :load_models)
require File.expand_path('../../config/environment', __FILE__)
require 'rspec/rails'
# Requires supporting ruby files with custom matchers and macros, etc,
# in spec/support/ and its subdirectories.
Dir[Rails.root.join('spec/support/**/*.rb')].each {|f| require f}
RSpec.configure do |config|
config.mock_with :rspec
config.include Mongoid::Matchers
DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
config.before do
DatabaseCleaner.clean
end
end
Bye the way, I would like to suggest you change your rails generator in config/application.rb, add the following code:
config.generators do |g|
g.orm :mongoid
g.template_engine :haml
g.test_framework :rspec, :fixture => false, :views => false
g.fixture_replacement :machinist
end
Guard
Guard watches files and runs a command after a file is modified. This allows you to automatically run tests in the background, restart your development server, reload the browser, and more.
Configuration
After you run bundle to install everything and, once that's done, run guard init rspec to set up Guard
$ guard init
Writing new Guardfile to (here is your path)
rspec guard added to Guardfile, feel free to edit it
It will generate a Guardfile in your rails root directory, make it like:
# A sample Guardfile
# More info at https://github.com/guard/guard#readme
guard 'rspec', :version => 2 do
watch(%r{^spec/.+_spec\.rb$})
watch(%r{^lib/(.+)\.rb$}) { |m| "spec/lib/#{m[1]}_spec.rb" }
watch('spec/spec_helper.rb') { "spec/" }
# Rails example
watch(%r{^spec/.+_spec\.rb$})
watch(%r{^app/(.+)\.rb$}) { |m| "spec/#{m[1]}_spec.rb" }
watch(%r{^lib/(.+)\.rb$}) { |m| "spec/lib/#{m[1]}_spec.rb" }
watch(%r{^app/controllers/(.+)_(controller)\.rb$}) { |m| ["spec/routing/#{m[1]}_routing_spec.rb", "spec/#{m[2]}s/#{m[1]}_#{m[2]}_spec.rb", "spec/acceptance/#{m[1]}_spec.rb"] }
watch(%r{^spec/support/(.+)\.rb$}) { "spec/" }
watch('spec/spec_helper.rb') { "spec/" }
watch('config/routes.rb') { "spec/routing" }
watch('app/controllers/application_controller.rb') { "spec/controllers" }
# Capybara request specs
watch(%r{^app/views/(.+)/.*\.(erb|haml)$}) { |m| "spec/requests/#{m[1]}_spec.rb" }
end
Guard also has support for Growl notifications and these can be enabled by installing the growl gem, You can find rb-fsevent and growl_notify as I listed in Gemfile, but it only works via Mac OSX, remove these if you are using linux.
We can now run the guard command to start up the Guard server.
$ guard
Guard is now watching at '/Users/shenjerry/Workspace/demo'
Guard::RSpec is running, with RSpec 2!
Running all specs
...
Finished in 1.02 seconds
3 examples, 0 failures
If we make a breaking change to our code, for example remove a method in your user model, Guard will run immediately and we’ll see the broken test clearly.
Machinist
Machinist is an awesome plugin which make it easy to create objects for use in tests, It generates data for the attributes you don't care about, and constructs any necessary associated objects, leaving you to specify only the fields you care about in your test.
Configuration
$ rails g machinist:install
It will generate blueprint.rb file in your spec/support directory.
Here is a example to define a blueprint:
require 'machinist/mongoid'
User.blueprint do
email { Faker::Internet.email }
username { "username_#{sn}" }
password { "password" }
password_confirmation { object.password }
end
If you want to create a user in your console, you need require the blueprints first
>> require Rails.root.join('spec', 'support/blueprints')
>> User.make!
Now you can find this user in database.
Another case that you want to define a admin blueprint as the same user model, if you supposed to add a whole blueprint again, that's ugly. Here is the simple way to handle this:
require 'machinist/mongoid'
User.blueprint(:admin) do
is_admin { true }
end
You can use User.make!(:admin) to create a admin.
>> require Rails.root.join('spec', 'support/blueprints')
>> User.make!(:admin)