autotest-ing your Rails Plugin
autotest is a great tool to easily test your Rails application. autotest runs in the background and continuously test your app, and notify you of the results, thus leaving you to build your app with the confidence of knowing that it isn’t going to break without your knowledge, and as soon as possible. It makes writing your tests easier, and the easier it is, the more likely you’ll end up doing it.
Note: I have only used autotest with RSpec, and all details are based on that. I also assume that your plugin is installed in vendor/plugins
I have been working on a plugin that uses RSpec to help me test the plugin’s integrity. After a while I got a little tired of continuously running a rake task to test it out.
Sadly by default, autotest doesn’t test your plugin directory. What a shame, but it also provides a challenge!
Enabling autotest on your Rails plugin
Now go into your plugin directory and create a folder called autotest.
cd vendor/plugins/secret_sauce/
mkdir autotest
Inside the autotest directory, create a file called discover.rb and dump this little gem inside:
While your in the root directory of your plugin, in my case its secret_sauce, just run autotest.
autotest
Boom! You are now autotest-ing your Rails plugin! Sweet.
Using your Application’s RSpec Options
You’ll notice that your autotests lack a bit of color… Or perhaps you want it to run the same options as your application. Have no worry soldier! First go to your spec directory in your plugin, and create a symbolic link back to the original spec.opts file.
Using your application’s RSpec options:
cd vendor/plugins/secret_sauce/spec
ln -s ../../../../spec/spec.opts
Note: This only works for Unix-like operating systems, thats Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD to name a few. For you Windows folks, you will have to just create a spec.opts file, or change your OS.
If you want to run under another set of options, just create a spec.opts file in the spec directory of your plugin, and fill in the details.
One shortcoming
Sure one shortcoming is that it’s not integrated when calling autotest in your application root directory, but something is always better than nothing.
