Recently I helped few people moving to Rails Edge and start using RSpec. I realized that I learned few tricks and even if for me everything seemed quite simple, things are not that simple when you recently started with Rails.

This would work on Mac and Linux, sorry Windows users, you’ll have to slightly change the code below.

Live on the Edge

This is actually a bit tricky but it was very well covered by John Nunemaker in this post

To sum John’s post:

Create a normal rails project:

$ rails my_project
$ cd my_project

$ rake rails:freeze:edge

(or use checkout edge in the vendor folder)

$ cd ..
$ ruby my_project/vendor/rails/railties/bin/rails my_edgie_project

You now have have a real Edge project called myedgieproject. You can delete the my_project folder since we only used it to create our real edge project.

Now, we are not really done since we need to add the Edge files into our vendor folder so we don’t use our local rails gem.

I would refer to another post from John, that you can find there

$ mkdir ~/rails
$ cd ~/rails
$ svn co http://dev.rubyonrails.com/svn/rails/trunk .

We just created a rails folder called rails in our home folder and we checked out edge/trunk in it.
Now let’s go in our Rails app and setup a symlink to the trunk folder we just created.

$ cd ~/rails_projects/my_edgie_project
$ ln -s ~/rails/trunk vendor/rails

If you are using subversion, you can ignore the symlink so it doesn’t try to version it:

$ svn propset svn:ignore "rails" vendor/
$ svn commit -m "using new sweet rails setup as recommended by John Nunemaker"
$ svn up

Read more for advanced settings etc…

Install RSpec

Very straight forward, you just need to follow the documentation

$ cd ~/rails_projects/my_edgie_project
$ ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/tags/CURRENT/rspec
$ ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/tags/CURRENT/rspec_on_rails

If you have TextMate, you might want to download the latest RSpec-X.Y.Z.tmbundle.tgz Bundle

Next thing you want to do is to install ZenTest

$ sudo gem install ZenTest

Make sure you install all the required packages.

If you are using Growl create a new file called .autotest in your home directory:

$mate ~./autotest

and add the following 2 lines to be warned when your specs/examples fail/pass

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

Now, lets go back to our project and create a model using the rspec scaffold (it uses scaffold_resource generator and create all the specs for you)

$ cd ~/rails_projects/my_edgie_project
$ ruby script/generate rspec_scaffold User first_name:string last_name:string :age:integer

Now, let’s start autotest (from zentest) so out code is tested in the background

$ autotest

There you go, really to modify your RSpec examples, make them fail, fix your code, examples should pass, refactor your code and start again

I recently realized that a lot of people using RSpec didn’t use the great TextMate bundle designed for them.

You might not think you need an extra bundle, or maybe you never used a bundle ever and don’t know why you would try one. I’ll try to change your mind, let’s look at some screenshots first:

This is what you will want to see before checking in your code:

This is what you will see before you write your code:

This is how you will run your specs:

This is all you get for free to save you some precious minutes every day:

How to install?

Easy, checkout the file from RSpec repository:

svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/trunk/RSpec.tmbundle

Double click on the file and that’s it! You are ready to go. (you would obviously need RSpec plugin or gem).

Thank you to all the RSpec team for creating such a great tool.