Autotest without Rails

December 6, 2007 code 3 min read

Autotest is a gem (well, technically ZenTest is a gem that includes autotest). But seriously, autotest is a gem! I can’t write code without it anymore. It has become my coding security blanket.

I started going through withdrawal last night while I was working on a Ruby library because autotest doesn’t work out of the box with plain ol’ Ruby projects. It assumes you’re using one of the Ruby web frameworks.

Here’s how to remedy that.

Aizatto shows us how to use autotest with your Rails plugins and RSpec. That’s a great start, but unfortunately, not all of my projects use RSpec (yet), and not all of them are Rails plugins.

To make autotest work with Test::Unit, we need to tell it how to map files to their tests. Here is a simple mapping that maps each ruby file in lib/ to the a corresponding test test/*_test.rb. For example, lib/foo/bar.rb would map to to a test in test/foo/bar_test.rb.

# autotest/testunit.rb
require 'autotest'

class Autotest::Testunit < Autotest
  def initialize # :nodoc:
    super
    @exceptions = /^\.\/(?:config|doc|log|tmp|website)/

    @test_mappings = {
      %r%^test/.*\.rb$% => proc { |filename, _|
        filename
      },
      %r%^lib/(.*)\.rb$% => proc { |_, m|
        ["test/#{m[1]}_test.rb"]
      },
      %r%^test/test_helper.rb$% => proc {
        files_matching %r%^test/.*_test\.rb$%
      },
    }
  end

  # Given the string filename as the path, determine
  # the corresponding tests for it, in an array.
  def tests_for_file(filename)
    super.select { |f| @files.has_key? f }
  end
end

We have the mapping, now all we need to do is tell autotest about it.

# autotest/discover.rb
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/testunit'

Autotest.add_discovery { "testunit" }

Throw both of those files into a autotest/ directory in your plain ol’ Ruby project and autotest should just work for you.

Extra credit: Make it work with RSpec on plain ol’ Ruby projects.

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— @bkeepers