Allow to force the test framework and the application init file on the command line

[mathieul]

Thanks for a great tool that already speeds up our TDD workflow!

I wanted to use it for 2 different apps, one using rails 2.3 and another one using 3.0. Also we're using RSpec inside our Cucumber scenarios, but are using Test unit for all other tests.

So I added an option to allow to force the test framework:

$ spin serve -t test

And another one to specify the application init file (config/application.rb for rails 3, config/environment.rb for rails 2 for instance):

$ spin serve -i config/environment.rb

As part of those modifications I refactored the code to structure it into classes (personal preference, makes it easier to extend) and am using OptParser standard library to parse the command line.

Thanks again, hopefully you'll find this pull request useful.

[jstorimer]

Hey Mathieu,

Glad it's working for you!

I incorporated the spirit behind your -t option as the --rspec option. I incorporated part of your optparse changes so now you can see the options supported with:

spin -h

I chose not to split everything into classes (yet). At this point in time I think it just adds more complexity to the project without much gain. If the codebase keeps growing then I'll probably split everything up as you did and put them in their own files under lib/.

I didn't incorporate your -i argument suggestion because you really don't want to load config/environment.rb for Rails 2. Doing so will preload all of your app code (models, controllers). So if you make any changes to your app and try to run tests with spin you'll be running tests against old code and unexpected results will ensue. Definitely don't want that. I don't do much with Rails 2 anymore but if we can come up with a working solution I'd be happy to include it.

Thanks for your hard work!

Jesse

[mathieul]

Hey Jesse,

I understand you don't want to complicate your code, and rocco helps easily go through it anyway.

Talking about that I should have spent more time reading your code and comments, and would have understood then that loading environment.rb was not a good idea… Sorry about that.

Thanks for pointing it out. I made a few tests this morning with our 2.3 app. I loaded config/boot.rb instead of the environment.rb, and:

- ran several times one of our unit test that takes 51 seconds when ran through "rake test:units TEST=test/..." (it's a big application, lots of legacy code, running tests takes forever…)
- ran it several time using guard (and the guard-shell plugin to spawn spin push when an application file or a test file is updated), and it then "only" takes 40 seconds

The gain is not huge, but it is still 20 % gain (that might be an extreme though, as the test file doesn't test much, so most it is spent in initialization - more tests would likely reduce the gain %).

Thanks again for spin, cheers!

-- Mathieu

On Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 10:00 PM, Jesse Storimer wrote:

Hey Mathieu,

Glad it's working for you!

I incorporated the spirit behind your -t option as the --rspec option. I incorporated part of your optparse changes so now you can see the options supported with:

spin -h

I chose not to split everything into classes (yet). At this point in time I think it just adds more complexity to the project without much gain. If the codebase keeps growing then I'll probably split everything up as you did and put them in their own files under lib/.

I didn't incorporate your -i argument suggestion because you really don't want to load config/environment.rb for Rails 2. Doing so will preload all of your app code (models, controllers). So if you make any changes to your app and try to run tests with spin you'll be running tests against old code and unexpected results will ensue. Definitely don't want that. I don't do much with Rails 2 anymore but if we can come up with a working solution I'd be happy to include it.

Thanks for your hard work!

Jesse

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#5 (comment)

[jstorimer]

Thanks for doing that research, that sounds promising. What does config/boot.rb look like in a Rails 2.3 app? Can you gist it?

[mathieul]

Hi Jesse,

Here you go: https://gist.github.com/1337051

-- Mathieu

On Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 9:35 PM, Jesse Storimer wrote:

Thanks for doing that research, that sounds promising. What does config/boot.rb look like in a Rails 2.3 app? Can you gist it?

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#5 (comment)

[jstorimer]

Thanks for that :) That file is such a hack! But it looks like it should work for our purposes. It will just preload Rails, and not the gem deps, but it looks like those are tightly coupled to the app initialization in 2.x.

I pushed some code to the jstorimer@rails2 branch (b338952) that should achieve the desired effect. Can you give it a try with your 2.x app?

[grosser]

atm in our rails 2 app we use a custom crappy thing to load our config/environment.rb and then fork of, it's not perfect, but it beats waiting 20s for a test run. This pull would be a great help in getting something a bit better, and it's a nice cleanup of the codebase either way