FakeFS

Mocha is great. But when your library is all about manipulating the filesystem, you really want to test the behavior and not the implementation.

If you're mocking and stubbing every call to FileUtils or File, you're tightly coupling your tests with the implementation.

def test_creates_directory
  FileUtils.expects(:mkdir).with("directory").once
  Library.add "directory"
end

The above test will break if we decide to use mkdir_p in our code. Refactoring code shouldn't necessitate refactoring tests.

With FakeFS:

def test_creates_directory
  Library.add "directory"
  assert File.directory?("directory")
end

Woot.

How is this different than MockFS?

FakeFS provides a test suite and works with symlinks. It's also strictly a test-time dependency: your actual library does not need to use or know about FakeFS.

Authors

Chris Wanstrath [chris@ozmm.org]