Articles about RSpec

Sometimes, when testing your code with RSpec, you’ll notice similarities and duplication between your spec files. Most of these will involve setup that doesn’t say much about the object under test. There’s something that helps you to reduce this duplication: Custom example groups! RSpec itself (rspec-rails) uses example groups for the different types of tests for models, controllers, helpers and views. In the following I’ll show you how to use them to reduce duplication and improve your tests.

When testing helper methods that use Rails’ output buffer (for example by calling concat) with RSpec, be sure to add this to your specs:

before (:each) do
  helper.output_buffer = ""
end

Took me a while to figure this one out. Apparently RSpec doesn’t initialize the output buffer and you end up with a NoMethodError on nil.

Andreas Wolff recently released RSpactor, a (up to now) command line tool similar to autotest. Nevertheless it differs from autotest in two points. First it’s focused on RSpec and secondly it’s using Mac OS’ FSEvents to monitor file changes. According to this it only runs on Mac OS. To get it running on Linux you’ll have to change RSpactor’s Listener class to use Linux’ equivalent to FSEvents called...