Nestor

Nestor is your butler, always holding the your tests’ door open and letting you peak inside.

Nestor is a continuous testing server for Rails. It has provisions for testing other kinds of projects, but it isn’t there yet.

Getting Started

  $ gem install nestor
  $ cd railsapp
  $ nestor

Nestor listens for file change events. When a file is changed, it will run the tests for that file only, and then verify your whole build. If a failure or error is found, Nestor will focus on the failing tests and files. Changing a file that is currently unfocused tells Nestor you’ve cast a wider net.

At this early stage, Nestor is pretty verbose regarding it’s operations. You can also enable +—debug+ mode to let the excellent [github.com/mynyml/watchr watchr] library give you even more information. If you want to report a bug, please include all appropriate logs.

Continuous Testing Server

Yes, I mean server in the sense that Nestor will load +test/test_helper.rb+ and run your tests by forking. Changing +test/test_helper.rb+ or anything in +config/+ will abort Nestor. With some more work, Nestor will be able to restart itself. Nestor also knows about +db/schema.rb+ and will run +rake db:test:prepare+ in the advent your schema changes.

Caveats / Warnings

Nestor internally uses the [codeforpeople.com/lib/ruby/slave/ Slave] gem to process results in a slave process. The processes communicate using DRb. Behavior is undefined if your own tests make use of DRb.

Also, all the top-level constants that Nestor’s dependencies declare will pollute your application’s namespace: Watchr, Slave, StateMachine and Thor. Should this be a problem, it would be possible to run your tests in a sub-process fashion, similar to the original Autotest. Running in this mode, none of Nestor’s constants would impact your process, except DRb, which Slave uses.

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

• Fork the project.
• Make your feature addition or bug fix.
• Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
• Commit, do not mess with Rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Copyright

Copyright © 2009 François Beausoleil. See LICENSE for details.