Sep 19

You've got all these test written to drive the development of your rails app, but you're still using rake test huh? Let's be honest, Test:Unit is a wonderful library that's made the Ruby testing world dance, but its output isn't what I'd call pretty.

There are plenty of testing toys out there you should be playing with, and one of the most important is ZenTest. If not for the cool new assertions, you should definitely be using the autotest utility.

Autotest

Start the autotest utility, and keep it running. It will detect file changes in your project and run the appropriate tests. Failed tests continue running until they pass, and after they pass, the full test suite is run. Super cool!

Autotest and Mac OS X

Get that autotest running in the background and receive eye candy GUI notifications when tests fail, thanks to Growl. And, it's easy to setup thanks to autotest plugins. Just create a .autotest file in your home directory, or the directory you run autotest from, and you're off and running. Here is mine:

require 'autotest/growl'
require 'autotest/redgreen'

These two lines enable Growl test notifications, and change the terminal output to include colored output.

Autotest and Other Platforms

There's plenty of love to go around. autotest ships with plugins to do test notification and reporting on most platforms. Just take a look at the example_dot_autotest.rb file that is included with ZenTest:

# require 'autotest/growl'
# require 'autotest/html_report'
# require 'autotest/kdenotify'
# require 'autotest/menu'
# require 'autotest/pretty'
# require 'autotest/redgreen'
# require 'autotest/snarl'
# require 'autotest/timestamp'

For more info about @autotest@, including a screencast, take a look at this NOR post.

Other Toys

Of course, you can use RedGreen to color the output from @Test::Unit@, there's even a wrapper script for RedGreen available. And Google reveals many pages relating to colored output of @Test::Unit@.

Cheat Sheet

Before you go, be sure to stop by TopFunky and get the Ruby on Rails Testing Cheat Sheet. It lists all the assertions from @Test::Unit@, Rails, and ZenTest's @Test::Rails@.