Ruby (on Rails)

I've been using Ruby on Rails for a few years, in my spare time, and hope to keep working with it whenever the opportunity arises. A couple of college friends and I created hospitalpages.ie which is was developed using Ruby on Rails, Git and Capistrano for deployment. I also hope to dabble more in pure Ruby scripting, to date I've used it for automating data insertion with MySQL and some file parsing.

BDD - Rails 3, AutoTest, RSpec and Growl

RSpec and AutoTest with Growl notifications set up for Ubuntu 10.10. Here's what worked for me. This is a rapid post to help me when I need to do this in the future. There is a more comprehensive guide for more platforms here http://ph7spot.com/musings/getting-started-with-autotest

lines that start with t: are to be run in terminal

t: sudo gem install rspec-rails

t: sudo gem install autotest

t: sudo gem install autotest-rails

t: sudo gem install autotest-growl

t: sudo gem install autotest-notification

t: sudo gem install test_notifier

t: sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

t: find ~/ -iname '.autotest'

t: sudo gedit

Add following lines .autotest file:

require "autotest/growl"

require "test_notifier/autotest"

t: an-install

t: rails new some-app-name>

t: rails scaffold some-name model-details

t: rake db:migrate (create the database before running this)

In application.rb of the rails app add the following lines:

1 config.generators do |g|</p>
2    g.test_framework :rspec</p>
3 end

Add the following to Gemfile of rails application

gem 'rspec'

gem 'rspec-rails'

t: rails generate rspec:install

t: rake -T spec

rake -t spec should show you the rspec rake tasks that are now available.

t: rake spec (this creates the test database entries required for you tests)

Start autotest under your rails application by typing autotest

If things have worked you should get a window pop up with a green smiley face, assuming you have some tests that pass, otherwise you'll see a red sad face.