Grasp Ruby on Rails

I thought I’d mention this briefly as rspec is becoming a very popular way to test. I was manually running my tests until I was recently pointed in the direction of auto-test with spec_server. This significantly increases the feedback loop for when your tests pass and fail; increasing productivity exponentially. The steps are as follows:

Install ZenTest:

sudo gem install ZenTest

Install rspec for rails:

http://rspec.rubyforge.org/documentation/rails/install.html

Open up a terminal and open run script/spec_server from the root of your rails application. Then open up another terminal and run autotest -rails (also inside of the root of the rails application). Edit a spec to make it fail, save it and watch autotest tell you it failed! I know you can get this to work with growl (I’m on Ubuntu so I don’t use growl). If someone with OS X experience can comment on how to get growl integrated and perhaps provide an alternative for linux, I will post it up.