Elliott Blatt

If you're a rails developer and you've been contemplating making the move to behavior driven development with rails, this will be a good place for you to start. Below you will find all the major steps necessary to get your Mac rails development environment all tricked out for BDD, including the much-enjoyed growl notifications. In addition to the fundamentals, (rspec, rspec_on_rails), it's highly reccomended that you install and configure a variety of supporting software applications (zentest, growl). What follows will get you up and running -- how you customize further, is up to you.

This tutorial assumes that you have a particular rails project that you are working with. I'll refer to this project as yourproject>. Some commands will need to be executed from your project root, while others will need to be run from your home directory -- which I'll refer to as yourcomputer>. Still, other commands may be entered from any directory you find yourself in. Please be aware of which directory you are in when copy commands out of this tutorial, this will save you some headaches.

1. Install the rspec plugin

   It's also possible to install the rspec gem, but I like to use plugins. see here for more information about rspec installation.

   yourproject> ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/tags/CURRENT/rspec
   

2. Install rspec_on_rails plugin

   see here for more information about rspec_on_rails installation.

   yourproject> ruby script/plugin install ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/tags/CURRENT/rspec_on_rails
   

3. Install ZenTest gem

   You will need to install the ZenTest gem.

   yourcomputer>sudo gem install ZenTest
   

   see more information on zentest

4. Install and configure growl (and growlnotify)

   1. download and install Growl from http://growl.info/

   2. NOTE: While configuring growl, make sure that the check-box labeled 'hide all notifications' is NOT checked. (!)
   3. Install growlnotify

      Your installation of Growl will give you some extras, one of these extras is called growlnotify. Install this in the following manner:

      yourcomputer>cd /Volumes/Growl 1.1.2/Extras/growlnotify/
      yourcomputer>sudo sh install.sh
      

      The version numbers shown may be different, to find out where your growlnotify is located, do the following:

      yourcomputer>locate growlnotify

5. Install redgreen gem

   In all honesty, I'm not sure if you really need to install this or not, I've read conflicting accounts, so, I'm not sure. I've installed redgreen and it certainly doesn't hurt anything.

   yourcomputer>sudo gem install redgreen

6. Configure autotest to work with growlnotify

   1. in your home (~) directory create a hidden file named .autotest (note the dot).

      yourcomputer> vi .autotest
      

   2. copy the following code and paste it into your .autotest file: (this code has been copied from http://blog.internautdesign.com/2006/11/12/autotest-growl-goodness ) and slightly modified by me.

      
      module Autotest::Growl
      
        def self.growl title, msg, img, pri=0, sticky=""
          system "growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title} #{sticky}"
        end
      
        Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
          results = [at.results].flatten.join("\n")
          output = results.slice(/(\d+)\s+examples?,\s*(\d+)\s+failures?(,\s*(\d+)\s+pending)?/)
          if output
            if $~[2].to_i > 0
              growl "Test Results", "#{output}", "~/Library/autotest/rails_fail.png", 2
            else
              growl "Test Results", "#{output}", "~/Library/autotest/rails_ok.png"
            end
          end
        end
      end
      

   3. In your ~/Library directory, create a directory called autotest

       yourcomputer> cd ~/Library
       yourcomputer> mkdir autotest
       

   4. Add these images to the new autotest directory that you have just created.

      

Putting it all together

1. start autotest

         yourproject> autotest -rails
         

2. generate your rspec and application scaffolding

          yourproject>ruby script/generate rspec
         

3. At this point, all your spec test results should appear as growl notifications! I'll be publishing more articles about how to use rspec with rails, so stay tuned.

7. more resources

   1. http://rspec.rubyforge.org/documentation/rails/install.html
   2. http://www.zenspider.com/ZSS/Products/ZenTest/
   3. http://www.growl.info/
   4. http://peepcode.com/
   5. http://rspec.rubyforge.org/documentation/index.html