Anyway, enough excuses, here are few tips that I believe will be useful to some of you:

ZenTest Autotest

I love autotest, but you might have noticed that sometimes (especially on big projects), ZenTest might start using more CPU than expected. On my machine, that results in the fan going off and annoying the crap out of me.

The solution is quite simple, exclude all folders you don’t need to monitor. To do that, update ZenTest to version 3.8.X

sudo gem update ZenTest

(older version had a different syntax)

Now, edit your .autotest that should be located in ~/.autotest (if it doesn’t exist, create it).

Finally add the following code:

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  Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |at|
    %w{.svn .hg .git vendor}.each {|exception| at.add_exception(exception)}
  end

I personally freeze rails in vendor and I autotest is way happier when it doesn’t have to monitor some extra files. (note that we also exclude folders such as .git or .svn)
(you can also include files etc… read more there)

RSpec

RSpec is certainly my favorite Ruby tool and I’m glad to say that most of my SD.rb friends finally got convinced!

Now, few people complained to me about spec failures outputting the full stack such as:

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 The Sessions controller should fail since it's a test' FAILED
 expected true, got false
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/expectations.rb:52:in `fail_with'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/expectations/handler.rb:21:in `handle_matcher'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/expectations/extensions/object.rb:34:in `should'
 ./spec/controllers/sessions_controller_spec.rb:25:
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/example/example_methods.rb:78:in `instance_eval'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/example/example_methods.rb:78:in `run_with_description_capturing'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/example/example_methods.rb:19:in `execute'
 /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:48:in `timeout'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/example/example_methods.rb:16:in `execute'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/example/example_group_methods.rb:288:in `execute_examples'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/example/example_group_methods.rb:287:in `each'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/example/example_group_methods.rb:287:in `execute_examples'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/example/example_group_methods.rb:121:in `run'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/runner/example_group_runner.rb:22:in `run'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/runner/example_group_runner.rb:21:in `each'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/runner/example_group_runner.rb:21:in `run'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/runner/options.rb:89:in `run_examples'
 test_app-git/trunk/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib/spec/runner/command_line.rb:19:in `run'
 script/spec:4:

  Finished in 6.035147 seconds

  400 examples, 1 failure

We can really easily change that, open you spec.opts file located in your spec folder.

it probably looks like that:

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  --colour
  --format
  progress
  --loadby
  mtime
  --reverse
  --backtrace

Get rid of “–backtrace” and your new failure should look like:

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  1)
  'The Sessions controller The Sessions controller should fail since it's a test' FAILED
  expected false, got true
  ./spec/controllers/sessions_controller_spec.rb:25:
  script/spec:4:

  Finished in 0.269956 seconds

  15 examples, 1 failure
  

Other stuff you may find interesting (in no particular order):

• spec converter
• Rails Cell
• Git to manage and deploy a Rails app
• contacts (retrieve user’s contacts from yahoo, gmail etc..)
• Hashrocket
• one of the best Rails book of the moment
• err’s new baby
• caboose conf 08
• git hub
• SWX Ruby (or how to get Rails to talk with Flash even faster)
• Ruby Reddit

As many of you know, I’m a great RSpec and autotest fan.

Last night, I upgraded my MacBook to from Tiger to Leopard and I everything went very well… apart that Autotest stopped notifying me using Growl when my tests pass or fail

Growl itself works fine, even when using spaces.

However growlNotify, the Growl plugin used by autotest doesn’t seem to be Leopard compatible yet.

Just thought you guys should know that before upgrading.

Jeremy from Switzerland came up with this great idea of adding audio report to Autotest. I’ve been using Growl to notify me when my tests would pass or fail, but I simply love just hearing a different sound based on the result of the tests.

(screenshot from this post)

Watch the screencast

p.s: I’m working on redesigning this blog, I don’t have much time and I hate IE I hope to get things fixed soon.

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