Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Autotest with verbose flag on

I followed a tip from David Chelimsky's blog and began running autotest with the -v flag for verbosity. When you first run it, you get a bunch of lines like this:

Dunno! spec/other_inbox_spec_helpers.rb
Dunno! app/views/layouts/main/_footer.erb

Which show all the files for which autotest doesn't have a mapping. With ZenTest 3.8.0 out, it's easy to add mappings (which tell autotest which tests to run when a matching file changes) and exceptions (which tell autotest which files to ignore). You can also set up .autotest files for particular projects, or for your whole development machine (~/.autotest).

Here's an example of a per-project .autotest I use, sitting in the Rails root directory. I've got a custom spec helper and I want to rerun all my tests if this file ever changes:

Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |at|
%w{ domain_regexp perfdata coverage reports }.each { |exception| at.add_exception(exception) }

at.add_mapping(/spec\/app_spec_helper.rb/) do |_, m|
at.files_matching %r%^spec/(controllers|helpers|lib|models|views)/.*\.rb$%
end

end

And here's part of my site-wide .autotest file, mostly cribbed from David's blog, where I'm ignoring other kinds of cruft that pile up in projects. Also note the mapping for spec/defaults.rb, a file I commonly setup in my specs containing default parameters for different models.

Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |at|
%w{.hg .git .svn stories tmtags Rakefile Capfile README spec/spec.opts spec/rcov.opts vendor/gems autotest svn-commit .DS_Store }.each {|exception|at.add_exception(exception)}

at.add_mapping(/spec\/defaults.rb/) do |f, _|
 at.files_matching %r%^spec/(controllers|helpers|lib|models|views)/.*\.rb$%
end

end

Labels: autotest, rails, rspec, testing

2 Comments:

At January 20, 2008 5:17 PM , Andrzej Krzywda said...: Nice article, thanks!

Do you know how to force autotest to run my 'stories/all.rb' file?

Any other way of running all of my RSpec stories whenever I change anything?

andrzejkrzywda.com
At January 21, 2008 8:47 AM , Mike said...: Something like:

at.add_mapping(/spec\/stories\/all.rb/) do |f, _|
at.files_matching %r%^spec/(controllers|helpers|lib|models|views)/.*\.rb$%
end

should work...