Semergence

I’ve been using RSpec with my latest project, and it’s a welcome change from the traditional Test::Unit for Ruby.

RSpec is a more natural way to write tests for your software. It seems to be much easier to compose tests, and anything that makes testing easier is OK in my book.

A specific example of why I’m falling for RSpec:

You can easily group common tests together, and include this grouping in your main tests. Of course you can do this in any number of ways with Test::Unit, but RSpec makes it so clean and obvious.

Here’s an example of a very common set of tests that I need to run again all my controllers:

describe "Requires Authorization", :shared => true do
  describe "when not logged in" do

    describe "when accessing index page" do
      it "should redirect to login page" do
        get 'index'
        response.should redirect_to(new_session_path)
      end
    end

    describe "when accessing new database page" do
      it "should redirect to login page" do
        get 'new'
        response.should redirect_to(new_session_path)
      end
    end

    describe "when accessing show database page" do
      it "should redirect to login page" do
        get 'show'
        response.should redirect_to(new_session_path)
      end
    end

    describe "when accessing destroy database page" do
      it "should redirect to login page" do
        get 'destroy'
        response.should redirect_to(new_session_path)
      end
    end

  end
end

In each of my controller tests, I only need to include:

describe DatabasesController do

  it_should_behave_like "Requires Authorization"

Take a look at that! Reads just like English, I would say.

If you haven’t made the jump to RSpec, I’d seriously recommend you give it a shot. You don’t need to abandon all of you existing unit tests. Both sets of tests will run just fine in your Rails project.