RSpec-2.0.0 is released!

October 10th, 2010

This marks the end of a year-long effort that improves RSpec in a number of ways, including modularity, cleaner code, and much better integration with Rails-3 than was possible before.

Docs, with a little bit of relish

In addition to the documentation available at all the places mentioned my earlier post, we’ve also got all of the Cucumber features posted to Justin Ko’s new Cucumber presentation app, relish.

http://relishapp.com/rspec

We’ll also have the RDoc up on http://rdoc.info in a day or so.

Thanks!

Big thanks to 80+ contributors who submitted patches for RSpec-2.0.0, including [1]:

Aan, Adam Walters, Akira Matsuda, Alex Crichton, Anderson Dias, Andre Arko, Andreas Neuhaus, Ashley Moran, Ben Armston, Ben Rady, Brasten Sager, Brian J Reath, Carlhuda, Chad Humphries, Charles Lowell, Chris Redinger, Chuck Remes, Corey Ehmke, Corey Haines, Dan Peterson, Dave Newman, David Genord II, David S. Kang, Ethan Gunderson, Gonçalo Silva, Greg Sterndale, Hans de Graaff, Iain Hecker, Jacques Crocker, Jean-Daniel Guyot, Jeff Ramnani, Jim Breen, Johan Kiviniemi, Josep Mª Bach, Josh Graham, Joshua Nichols, Kabari Hendrick, Kristian M, Lailson B, Len Smith, Leonardo Bessa, Les Hill, Luis Lavena, Marcin Kulik, Markus Schirp, Matt Remsik, Matt Yoho, Matthew Todd, Michael Niessner, Mike Gehard, Myron Marston, Nate Jackson, Neeraj Singh, Nestor Ovroy, Nick Ang, Nicolas Braem, Paul Rosania, Phil Smith, Postmodern, Prasad, Rob Sanheim, Roman Chernyatchik, Ryan Bigg, Ryan Briones, Sam Pohlenz, Scott Taylor, Shin-ichiro OGAWA, Thibaud Guillaume-Gentil, Tim Connor, Tim Harper, Tom Stuart, Vít Ondruch, Wincent Colaiuta, aslakhellesoy, eira, garren smith, grosser, hasimo, justinko, rup, speedmax, wycats

Extra special thanks go to:

  • Chad Humphries for contributing his Micronaut gem which is the basis for rspec-core-2
  • Yehuda Katz, Carl Lerche, and José Valim, for their assistance with getting rspec-rails-2 to take advantage of new APIs in Rails-3, and for shepherding patches to Rails that made it far simpler for testing extensions like rspec-rails to hook into Rails’ testing infrastructure. Their work here has significantly reduced the risk that Rails point-releases will break rspec-rails.
  • Myron Marston for a wealth of thoughtful contributions including Cucumber features that we can all learn from
  • Justin Ko for his direct contributions to rspec, and for relish, which makes executable documentation act more like documentation.

What’s next?

rspec-rails-2 for rails-2

There are a couple of projects floating around that support rspec-2 and rails-2. I haven’t had the chance to review any of these myself, but my hope is that we’ll have be an official rspec-2 for rails-2 gem in the coming months.

rspec-1 maintenance

rspec-1 will continue to get maintenance releases, but these will be restricted, primarily, to bug fixes. Any new features will go into rspec-2, and will likely not be back-ported.

[1] Contributor names were generated from the git commit logs.

Posted by David Filed in BDD, Cucumber, RSpec, Rails
17 Comments »

RSpec-2.0.0.rc is released!

October 4th, 2010

See http://blog.davidchelimsky.net/2010/07/01/rspec-2-documentation for links to all sorts of documentation on rspec-2.

Plan is to release rspec-2.0.0 (final) within the next week, so please install, upgrade, etc, and report issues to:

http://github.com/rspec/rspec-core/issues
http://github.com/rspec/rspec-expectations/issues
http://github.com/rspec/rspec-mocks/issues
http://github.com/rspec/rspec-rails/issues

Many thinks to all of the contributors who got us here!

rspec-core-2.0.0.rc / 2010-10-05

full changelog

  • Enhancements

    • implicitly require unknown formatters so you don’t have to require the file explicitly on the commmand line (Michael Grosser)
    • add –out/-o option to assign output target
    • added fail_fast configuration option to abort on first failure
    • support a Hash subject (its([:key]) { should == value }) (Josep M. Bach)

  • Bug fixes

    • Explicitly require rspec version to fix broken rdoc task (Hans de Graaff)
    • Ignore backtrace lines that come from other languages, like Java or Javascript (Charles Lowell)
    • Rake task now does what is expected when setting (or not setting) fail_on_error and verbose
    • Fix bug in which before/after(:all) hooks were running on excluded nested groups (Myron Marston)
    • Fix before(:all) error handling so that it fails examples in nested groups, too (Myron Marston)

rspec-expectations-2.0.0.rc / 2010-10-05

full changelog

  • Enhancements

    • require ‘rspec/expectations’ in a T::U or MiniUnit suite (Josep M. Bach)

  • Bug fixes

    • change by 0 passes/fails correctly (Len Smith)
    • Add description to satisfy matcher

rspec-mocks-2.0.0.rc / 2010-10-05

full changelog

  • Enhancements

    • support passing a block to an expecttation block (Nicolas Braem)
    • obj.should_receive(:msg) {|&block| … }

  • Bug fixes

    • Fix YAML serialization of stub (Myron Marston)
    • Fix rdoc rake task (Hans de Graaff)

rspec-rails-2.0.0.rc / 2010-10-05

full changelog

  • Enhancements
    • add –webrat-matchers flag to scaffold generator (for view specs)
    • separate ActiveModel and ActiveRecord APIs in mock_model and stub_model
    • ControllerExampleGroup uses controller as the implicit subject by default (Paul Rosania)
Posted by David Filed in BDD, RSpec
2 Comments »

RSpec-2.0.0.beta.22 is released!

September 12th, 2010

We’re getting very close to a 2.0 release candidate, so if you’re not already using rspec-2 (with or without rails-3), now is the time to start. I need your feedback, so from here on in I’ll be sending out announcements and release notes for each beta release.

As for rspec-2 with rails-2, there are a few efforts underway to make that work, but that will be in the form of a separate gem and our priority is getting rspec-2 out the door.

Please report issues or submit pull requests (yes, pull requests are fine now that github has integrated them so well with issues) to the appropriate repos:

Here are release notes for each gem in this beta release, drawn from the nascent History.md files in each project.

rspec-core-2.0.0.beta.22 / 2010-09-12

full changelog

  • Enhancements

    • removed at_exit hook
    • CTRL-C stops the run (almost) immediately
    • first it cleans things up by running the appropriate after(:all) and after(:suite) hooks
    • then it reports on any examples that have already run
    • cleaned up rake task
    • generate correct task under variety of conditions
    • options are more consistent
    • deprecated redundant options
    • run ‘bundle exec autotest’ when Gemfile is present
    • support ERB in .rspec options files (Justin Ko)
    • depend on bundler for development tasks (Myron Marston)
    • add example_group_finished to formatters and reporter (Roman Chernyatchik)

  • Bug fixes

    • support paths with spaces when using autotest (Andreas Neuhaus)
    • fix module_exec with ruby 1.8.6 (Myron Marston)
    • remove context method from top-level
    • was conflicting with irb, for example
    • errors in before(:all) are now reported correctly (Chad Humphries)

  • Removals

    • removed -o –options-file command line option
    • use ./.rspec and ~/.rspec

rspec-expectations-2.0.0.beta.22 / 2010-09-12

full changelog

  • Enhancements

    • diffing improvements
    • diff multiline strings
    • don’t diff single line strings
    • don’t diff numbers (silly)
    • diff regexp + multiline string

  • Bug fixes

    • should[_not] change now handles boolean values correctly

rspec-mocks-2.0.0.beta.22 / 2010-09-12

full changelog

  • Bug fixes
    • fixed regression that broke obj.stub_chain(:a, :b => :c)
    • fixed regression that broke obj.stub_chain(:a, :b) { :c }
    • respond_to? always returns true when using as_null_object

2.0.0.beta.22 / 2010-09-12

full changelog

  • Enhancements

    • autotest mapping improvements (Andreas Neuhaus)

  • Bug fixes

    • delegate flunk to assertion delegate
Posted by David Filed in BDD, RSpec, Rails
No Comments »

The RSpec Book has entered the production process!

July 30th, 2010

I’m thrilled to announce that The RSpec Book has entered the production process!

For those of you unfamiliar with the publishing industry, as I was before this project, “has entered the production process” does not mean that it’s off to the printer. What it does mean is that it is currently being indexed so readers will be able to find the stuff they’re looking for. After indexing it will be copyedited (in which someone with better grammar and spelling than any of the authors possess makes the book more readable) and typeset, and then off to the printer.

If all goes to plan (yes, there actually is a plan!), books.should be_on_shelves in late September, early October.

That light at the end of the tunnel is, finally, not an oncoming train!

Posted by David Filed in BDD, RSpec, Rails, The RSpec Book
3 Comments »

The RSpec Book - Beta 14

July 24th, 2010

The Pragmatic Bookshelf has just released Beta-14 of The RSpec Book.

This is the first beta release since we made the rather ambitious decision to update the book for RSpec-2 and Rails-3, and includes updates to the tutorial in Part I of the book, as well as the first chapter in Part III: Code Examples.

We’re planning two more beta releases over the next couple of weeks. One to update the rest of Part III, and then a final beta release with Part V (the Rails section) updated to RSpec-2 and Rails-3.

What this means for the short run is that 1/2 of the beta book uses newer gem versions, while the rest uses the old versions. We thought for a long time about whether to delay this beta until it was all up to date, but decided in the end that beta readers had waited long enough—now that RSpec 2 and Rails 3 release candidates are just around the corner, we wanted to get this new content out as soon as we could. Keep in mind that this is only for a week or two, while we put the finishing touches on the book.

With that in mind, here is some information that will help you navigate the beta book:

Ruby 1.8.7

The code examples in the book were written using Ruby 1.8.7. Most of them, but not all, will work with 1.9.2-rc2.

Code for the updated chapters in beta-14

While we’re getting these last few beta releases out, the updated chapters all have red headers, like this:

Updated Section Header

The examples in these chapters work with the following gem versions:

rspec-2.0.0.beta.18
cucumber-0.8.5

Code for the rest of the chapters in beta-14

The chapters that have not been updated yet have gray headers, like this:

Non-updated Section Header

The examples in these chapters work with the following gem versions:

rspec-1.3.0
rspec-rails-1.3.2
rails-2.3.5
cucumber-0.6.2
cucumber-rails-0.2.4
database_cleaner-0.4.3
webrat-0.7.0
selenium-client-0.2.18

Reporting Errata

Technical errors in the updated chapters

We are now in the final phases of preparing the book for print. For those of you reading the beta book, we are very interested in technical errata in the updated chapters. If the behaviour of any examples in the updated chapters differs from what the book tells you to expect with the versions listed above, please report that to http://www.pragprog.com/titles/achbd/errata.

Copyedit issues

The book has not been through copyedit yet (that’s next), so please don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or phrasing. That will all be addressed by our very able copyeditor.

Typesetting issues

The book has not been formally typeset yet (that’s last), so please don’t worry about code examples that span page turns, or issues with syntax highlighting.

Other technical errors

If you find that the behaviour works differently with newer Ruby or gem versions than those listed above, please submit bug reports to the appropriate trackers:

Posted by David Filed in RSpec, The RSpec Book
3 Comments »

rspec-rails-2 generators and rake tasks

July 11th, 2010

As of rspec-rails-2.0.0.beta.17, generators and rake tasks are exposed through a Railtie. In order to see them when you run rails generate and rake -T, you need to include the rspec-rails gem in the :development group in your Gemfile.

group :development, :test do
  gem "rspec-rails", ">= 2.0.0.beta.17"
end

If you have a previous version of rspec-rails-2.0.0.beta installed, you should also remove these files:

lib/tasks/rspec.rake
config/initializers/rspec_generator.rb

Posted by David Filed in RSpec, Rails
8 Comments »

RSpec-2 Documentation

July 1st, 2010

RSpec-2 is getting close to a release candidate, and as the beta gems have been flowing a lot of questions have been coming in, especially about documentation. Here is some information that should help.

Source code

RSpec development has moved to the rspec account on github. There are five repositories at the moment:

rspec-rails depends on rspec, which depends, in turn, on the other three.

This structure has many benefits, but one cost is that the documentation, though plentiful, is a bit scattered.

READMEs

Upgrade Notes

Cucumber features

Each of the repos has a growing set of Cucumber features. Some of the features have been added in after the fact, but many of the new features have been driven out using Cucumber. These are a great source of “How-To” information, and you know they’re up to date because they are executable documentation.

If you peruse these and are unable to find the information you’re looking for, or find any of the information incomplete or confusing, please, please, please submit a github issue (see Known Issues, below). Or, better yet, submit a patch!

RDoc

The RDoc is arguably the weakest link here. Patches welcome!

Known Issues

Issues for rspec-2 are being maintained on github.

If you want to submit an issue and you’re not sure which tracker it belongs in, just pick the one you think is most appropriate. I’m more interested in getting the feedback then you knowing where to put the issue. I’ll move it to the right place if necessary.

Wikis

PLEASE NOTE: github wikis can be updated by anybody with a github account, and I don’t get any notification when wiki pages have changed. Most of the time, users add valuable information, but the structure is poor and always in flux, and there have been occasions in which the information was either misleading or simply inaccurate. The Cucumber features mentioned above, though currently incomplete, are a much better source for accurate documentation.

The RSpec Book

The RSpec Book is being updated for RSpec-2 and Rails-3. There will still be references back to RSpec-1 and Rails-2 where things have changed, but the focus will be on the way forward. Once the rails-3 and rspec-2 release candidates are out, we’ll release one more updated PDF of the book for those in the beta program, and then off to the printer it goes. FINALLY!

Posted by David Filed in BDD, RSpec
7 Comments »

Filtering examples in rspec-2

June 14th, 2010

In RSpec-2, every example group and example has associated metadata, to which you can append arbitrary information. This allows you to slice and dice a spec suite in a variety of ways.

Adding arbitrary metadata

The describe and it methods, and their aliases, each accept a hash as the last argument before the block:

describe "something", :this => {:is => :arbitrary} do
  it "does something", :and => "so is this" do
    # ...
  end
end

filter_run

The keys in these hashes can be accessed in a number of ways via RSpec.configure. If, for example, you’re working on a specific example and don’t want to run the full suite, you can use the filter_run method on the configuration like this:

# in spec/spec_helper.rb
RSpec.configure do |c|
  c.filter_run :focus => true
end
 
# in spec/any_spec.rb
describe "something" do
  it "does something", :focus => true do
    # ....
  end
end

Now if you run rspec spec, it will only run that one example, no matter how many others there are in the suite.

This works for examples and groups, so if you want to run all the examples in one group that you’re focusing on, but nothing else, you can do this:

RSpec.configure do |c|
  c.filter_run :focus => true
end
 
describe "something", :focus => true do
  it "does something" do
    # ....
  end
  it "does something else" do
    # ....
  end
end

The rspec command would now run both of the examples in that group.

filter_run_excluding

This is the inverse of filter_run. It excludes any examples or groups that match the filter:

RSpec.configure do |c|
  c.filter_run_excluding :slow => true
end
 
describe "something", :slow => true do
  it "does something" do
    # ....
  end
  it "does something else" do
    # ....
  end
end

The rspec command would now run all the other examples in the suite, but not these two.

NOTE: filter_run_excluding was added in beta.12, which was just released this morning.

lambda

You can filter on runtime conditions by assigning a lambda to a key. If your app is expected to behave differently in different versions of Ruby, you can use a lambda with filter_run_excluding like this:

RSpec.configure do |c|
  c.filter_run_excluding :ruby => lambda {|version|
    !(RUBY_VERSION.to_s =~ /^#{version.to_s}/)
  }
end
 
describe "something" do
  it "does something", :ruby => 1.8 do
    # ....
  end
  it "does something", :ruby => 1.9 do
    # ....
  end
end

This example comes directly from rspec-core’s own spec_helper.rb.

RSpec passes 1.8 and 1.9 to the lambda, which accepts it as the version block argument. If the lambda returns true, the example is excluded from the run (because we’re using filter_run_excluding). Now the first example will only run if the ruby version is 1.8. Similarly, the latter example only runs under 1.9.

(no) command line support (yet)

We plan to add some sort of command line API to access these filters, but we’re not sure yet what this is going to look like. There is an open issue in github issues for rspec-core . Please feel free to review and add any comments there.

Posted by David Filed in RSpec
13 Comments »

rspec-2 and autotest

March 15th, 2010

[Updated on 17 March, 2010]

I just released rspec-2.0.0.beta.4 with support for autotest, among other enhancements. Autotest integration is going to be a bit different in rspec-2. We’re removing the autospec command, which did nothing but set an environment variable and call autotest.

In rspec-2, you’ll use the autotest command directly, but doing so requires a small bit of configuration. As of beta.4, you’ll have to do add this configuration manually. Just create an autotest directory in the root of your project, put the following statement in ./autotest/discover.rb:

Autotest.add_discovery { "rspec2" }

The final 2.0.0 release will include a generator (even for non-rails projects) that will add this for you.

Posted by David Filed in Autotest, RSpec
24 Comments »

Rspec 2.0 in the works

January 25th, 2010

We’ve started to do some preliminary work on rspec-2.0, which we plan to release before Rails-3 goes final. At that point, the rspec-rails-2.0 plugin/gem will only work with rspec >= 2.0 and rails >= 3.0.

We’re committed to making the upgrade from rspec-1.x to rspec-2.0 as seamless as possible for most users, but extenders are going to see some differences. This is why we’re going to take our time with alpha, beta, and candidate releases.

Here are some of the improvements you can expect:

Modularity

Following the Rails and Merb models, Rspec-2 will be broken up into component gems and a meta-gem that depends on them. Most users will still gem install rspec, and doing so will install the component gems.

We’ve broken rspec up into 4 repos in the rspec account on github:

  • rspec => meta gem that depends on the others
  • rspec-core => runner and output formatters
  • rspec-expectations => should and matchers
  • rspec-mocks => mocks and stubs

With separate component repos, you’ll be able to use rspec as you do today or mix and match components with other frameworks. This will also make it easier for contributors to contribute to the components they are interested in without worrying about other components.

New runner extracted from Micronaut

The rspec-core repository is a complete rewrite of the runner, which has been a big sore spot over the years for contributors and extenders. We extracted the runner from Micronaut, which is an Rspec-compatible framework written by Chad Humphries.

Micronaut has a simple and powerful metadata model, which allows us to easily slice and dice a spec suite in much the same way we do now with Cucumber using tags. It also helps to simplify rspec’s own specs (because you can access it from within an example).

Because we’re able to intercept examples before they are run, we’ll also be able to offer a clean extension API, allowing you to add structures like Merb’s given blocks without monkey patching. Less monkey patching == more maintainable.

Where we are today

While Micronaut runs the same specs that Rspec does, there are some different names for things, and there are some differences in the CLI as well. We’ve started to resolve some of the differences in rspec-core, but we have a way to go.

If you want to try it out and see what works and what doesn’t, you can either install the prerelease gems (2.0.0.a2 as of this writing):

[sudo] gem install rspec --prerelease

You can also grab the dev environment and have a look at the code. See the rspec-dev README for info.

Please do not start reporting issues yet as this will only slow us down.

There is a lot that works, but there is also a lot that doesn’t. Once we get to beta, we’ll be looking for feedback and contributions, but for now we just want to let you know where things are.

Rspec 2 uses Rspec as the root namespace and installs an rspec command instead of a spec command. Until we release 2.0.0 final, this will make it easy for you to keep things separate on your system and in your apps. Once we go final we’ll either alias the old names or release a separate backwards-compatibility wrapper gem that does this for you.

What’s next

We want to focus most of our efforts on rspec-2 at this point, so we don’t plan any new development on the rspec-1.x series. We’ll do bug-fix releases of rspec[-rails]-1.3, but no new features.

I’ll follow up with more information as it becomes clear. Look here for announcements about alpha and beta releases if you’re interested in trying it out early or getting involved.

Posted by David Filed in RSpec
18 Comments »
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