Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
135 lines (101 loc) · 4.15 KB

guard-spring-setup.md

File metadata and controls

135 lines (101 loc) · 4.15 KB
Raw

Fast And Easy Testing With spring And guard

Gems

Make sure that your Gemfile includes these entries (and bundle install):

group :development, :test do
  gem 'spring'
  gem 'rspec-rails'
end

group :development do
  gem 'spring-commands-rspec'
  gem 'guard-rspec'
end

  • spring is a Rails application pre-loader; it's included by default in Rails 4.1+ apps. Spring speeds up development by keeping your application running in the background, so you don't need to boot it every time you run a test, rake task, or migration. Loading up your Rails application usually takes several seconds (that's distinct from the time to actually run the specs), which is pretty annoying when you might be running your test suite several times per minute.

  • rspec-rails is somewhat self-explanatory.

  • spring-commands-rspec allows you to leverage Spring's preloading when running your RSpec tests.

  • guard is a gem that monitors for changes to files whose paths match regular expressions that we set up. The guard-rspec plugin will install the main guard gem as a dependency and allows us to trigger the execution of RSpec tests in response to changes to your app's files.

Setup Guard

Run:

bundle exec guard init

This will create a Guardfile for you. This is where you setup regexs to match file paths that you want to monitor. Since we have guard-rspec installed, the generated Guardfile file will include a bunch of comments and a default Guard setup for running RSpec tests for a Rails app. That's fine, and might be a good starting point for a large app where you only want to run certain specs when certain files are changed, but without proper tweaking Guard probably won't guess quite correctly which specs you want to run and when. For simplicity's sake, we can start with a brute-force approach, and simply run all of the specs whenever any file changes in the app or spec directories (or config/routes.rb, for good measure.) Simply replace everything in your Guardfile with these five lines:

guard :rspec, cmd: 'spring rspec' do
  watch(%r{^app/}) { 'spec' }
  watch(%r{^spec/}) { 'spec' }
  watch('config/routes.rb') { 'spec' }
end

Our ability to call guard :rspec here comes from the guard-rspec plugin gem that we installed. Also, note that we are passing cmd: 'spring rspec'. This will leverage spring's application preloading to run our specs quickly.

As your test suite grows larger, you can change the catch-all 'spec' command to name a specific spec directory (such as 'spec/models' or 'spec/features') or a specific spec file (such as 'spec/features/auth_spec.rb') to only trigger the execution of whichever specs you are focusing on at the moment.

Setup Rspec

If you haven't already, set up RSpec with

rails g rspec:install

N.B. If this command seems to hang, close it out and try running:

spring stop

Setup Spring

Run:

spring binstub --all

This will create and/or modify some files in your bin directory so that certain commands (rspec, rake, and rails) can be run via the Spring runner.

Every Day I'm Testing

You are ready to roll! Run

bundle exec guard

to fire up a Guard console. Now whenever you save a file, Guard should run all of your specs for you! They will run as slowly as ever the first time around, because Spring hasn't loaded our application's environment yet. But the second time that you save a file and your specs run (and every time thereafter), they should run noticeably more quickly. That's pretty convenient.

Problems?

Version Issues

You might see an error like You have already activated spring 1.3.3, but your Gemfile requires spring 1.3.2. This is fixed easily with bundle update spring.

Other

If you run into any problems that you suspect are spring-related, the command spring stop (at the command line) will shut down the Spring server. In particular, if you find that rails g rspec:install is hanging, try stopping Spring and running rails g rspec:install again.

After stopping Spring, it will automatically boot back up again (with your latest application environment) when you next run a test, rake task, or migration.