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This blog article is out of date, check out Mac-friendly Autotest instead.

BDD is Fun

Besides the positive impact on code quality, BDD has a fun factor of it’s own. It adds some immediate and colorful feedback to the work cycles and makes me feel like being the pilot of my code.

Setting things up is quite easy nowadays, but as many howtos out there have come to a certain age, here’s one for RSpec 1.2 and Cucumber 0.3. Test::Unit is supported as well. (This is work in progress, so please feel free to post your comments and check back as I’m going to update this post for a while.)

Requirements

This howto assumes that you are working on a Rails application and that your workstation is running Mac OS X with the latest and greatest version of Growl installed.

Installation

First install the gems necessary to work with Ruby on Rails applications:

gem install rspec rspec-rails cucumber webrat ZenTest

Webrat is optional, but you don’t want to miss it. Now define some environment variables:

echo "export AUTOFEATURE=true" >>~/.profile
echo "export RSPEC=true" >>~/.profile
source .profile

If you prefer to set these in your application, add the following lines to the top of config/environments/test.rb instead:

ENV['AUTOFEATURE'] = 'true'
ENV['RSPEC'] = 'true'

Next are the images which will be displayed in Growl notifications:

wget http://www.bitcetera.com/page_attachments/0000/0009/autotest_images.zip
unzip autotest_images.zip
mv autotest_images ~/.autotest_images

And finally create the configuration file ~/.autotest:

module Autotest::Growl

  def self.growl title, msg, img, pri=0, stick=""
    system "growlnotify -H localhost -n autotest --image #{img} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title} #{stick}"
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :run_command do
    @label = File.basename(Dir.pwd).upcase
    @run_scenarios = false
    print "\n"*2 + '-'*80 + "\n"*2
    print "\e[2J\e[f"   # clear the terminal
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |autotest|
    gist = autotest.results.grep(/\d+\s+(example|test)s?/).map {|s| s.gsub(/(\e.*?m|\n)/, '') }.join(" / ")
    if gist == ''
      growl "#{@label} cannot run tests", '', "~/.autotest_images/ruby_grey.png"
    else
      if gist.match /[1-9]\d*\s+(failure|error)/
        growl "#{@label} fails some tests", "#{gist}", "~/.autotest_images/ruby_red.png"
      elsif gist.match /pending/
        growl "#{@label} has pending tests", "#{gist}", "~/.autotest_images/ruby_yellow.png"
        @run_scenarios = true
      else
        growl "#{@label} passes all tests", "#{gist}", "~/.autotest_images/ruby_green.png"
        @run_scenarios = true
      end
    end
  end

  # FIXME: This is a temporary workaround until Cucumber is properly integrated!
  Autotest.add_hook :waiting do |autotest|
    if @run_scenarios
      gist = autotest.results.grep(/\d+\s+(scenario|step)s?/).map {|s| s.gsub(/(\e.*?m|\n)/, '') }.join(" / ")
      if gist == ''
        growl "#{@label} cannot run scenarios", '', "~/.autotest_images/ruby_grey.png"
      else
        if gist.match /failed/
          growl "#{@label} fails some scenarios", "#{gist}", "~/.autotest_images/ruby_red.png"
        elsif gist.match /undefined/
          growl "#{@label} has undefined scenarios", "#{gist}", "~/.autotest_images/ruby_yellow.png"
        else
          growl "#{@label} passes all scenarios", "#{gist}", "~/.autotest_images/ruby_green.png"
        end
      end
    end
  end

end

Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |autotest|
    %w{.svn .hg .git vendor}.each {|exception| autotest.add_exception(exception) }
end

A few things to note here:

• ZenTest does not yet really support Cucumber. However, this workaround does the trick if you use RSpec or Test::Unit as well.
• The Growl message titles may be too long for some display styles, a good choice is “Music Video”.
• The run_command hook clears the terminal every time before tests are ran, however, you can still scroll up to previous output. Every test run is separated with a line of dashes.
• The “cannot run tests/scenarios” message is shown e.g. when you have a serious syntax error in your specs like do-end nesting typos.
• The -H localhost argument is a workaround for a glitch which lets Growl 1.1.4 on Mac OS X 10.5 randomly ignore some notifications. However, it will only work if you check “System Preferences -> Growl -> Network -> Listen for incoming notifications”. (You’ll get a NSPortTimeoutException from growlnotify if you don’t do this.) Furthermore, when using this setup for the first time, you have to check “System Preferenes → Growl → Network → Allow remote application registration” as well. Once autotest is in the list of Growl applications, you can uncheck this again.

Usage

Just change into the RAILS_ROOT directory and fire up autotest:

autotest

Whenever you save a file of your Rails project, all relevant tests will be ran and you get both a Growl feedback and detailed test results in the terminal.

(Sven Schwyn)

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