David Chelimsky

random thoughtlessness

RSpec-2.8 is released!

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We released RSpec-2.8.0 today with a host of new features and improvements since 2.7. Some of the highlights are described below, but you can see the full changelogs at:

Documentation

While not 100% complete yet, we’ve made great strides on RSpec’s RDoc:

http://rspec.info is now just a one pager (desperate for some design love – volunteers please email rspec-users@rubyforge.org). All the old pages are redirects to the relevant RDoc at http://rubydoc.info. RSpec-1 info is still available at http://old.rspec.info.

We’ve still got Cucumber features up at http://relishapp.com/rspec, but we’re going to be phasing that out as the primary source of documentation. There are a lot of reasons for this, and I’ll try to follow up with a separate blog post on this topic.

rspec-core

Improved support for tags and filtering

You can now set default tags/filters in either RSpec.configure or a .rspec file and override these tags on the command line. For example, this configuration tells rspec to run all the examples that are not tagged :slow:

# in spec/spec_helper.rb
RSpec.configure do |c|
  c.treat_symbols_as_metadata_keys_with_true_values = true
  c.filter_run_excluding :slow
end

Now when you want run those, you can just do this:

rspec --tag slow

This will override the configuration and run onlly the examples tagged :slow.

—order rand

We added an --order option with two supported values: rand and default.

rspec --order random (or rand) tells RSpec to run the groups in a random order, and then run the examples within each group in random order. We implemented it this way (rather than complete randomization of every example) because we don’t want to re-run expensive before(:all) hooks. A fair tradeoff, as the resulting randomization is just as effective at exposing order-dependency bugs.

When you use --order random, RSpec prints out the random number it used to seed the randomizer. When you think you’ve found an order-dependency bug, you can pass the seed along and the order will remain consistent:

--order rand:3455

--order default tells RSpec to load groups and examples as they are declared in each file.

rspec —init

We added an --init switch to the rspec command to generate a “spec” directory, and “.rspec” and “spec/spec_helper.rb” files with some starter code in them.

rspec-expectations

We discovered that the matcher DSL generates matchers that run considerably slower than classes which implement the matcher protocol. We made some minor improvements in the DSL, but to really improve things we re-implemented every single built-in matcher as a class.

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