Kevin Sylvestre

Kevin Sylvestre

A Ruby and Swift developer and designer.

Faster Testing in Rails with Guard for Zeus, RSpec, and Cucumber

Coast

Two amazing tools that focus on improving how tests are run rather than written in Ruby on Rails are Zeus and Guard. So what are they?

Zeus

Zeus will preload a Ruby on Rails application so that you don't have to whenever running rake, spec, or server commands.

Guard

Guard monitors the file system and executes tasks whenever files are change.

Integration

The challenge then becomes setting up Zeus and Guard to work together:

Step 1. Setup Your Gems

Follow this example Gemfile configured to work with growl, guard, rspec, cucumber and capybara:

group :development do
  gem "growl"
  gem "guard"
  gem "guard-bundler"
  gem "guard-cucumber"
  gem "guard-rspec"
  gem "guard-zeus"
  gem "rb-inotify", require: false
  gem "rb-fsevent", require: false
  gem "rb-fchange", require: false
end

group :test do
  gem "capybara"
  gem "capybara-webkit"
  gem "rspec-rails"
  gem "cucumber-rails"
end

Step 2. Setup Your Guards

Follow this example Guardfile configured for cucumber and rspec:

guard "bundler" do
  watch("Gemfile")
end

guard "cucumber", command_prefix: "zeus", bundler: false do
  watch(%r{^features/.+\.feature$})
  watch(%r{^features/support/.+$}) { "features" }
  watch(%r{^features/step.+/.+$})  { "features" }
end

guard "rspec", zeus: true, bundler: false do
  watch(%r{^spec/.+_spec\.rb$})
  watch(%r{^lib/(.+)\.rb$})     { |m| "spec/lib/#{m[1]}_spec.rb" }
  watch("spec/spec_helper.rb")  { "spec" }

  watch(%r{^app/(.+)\.rb$})                           { |m| "spec/#{m[1]}_spec.rb" }
  watch(%r{^app/(.*)(\.erb|\.slim|\.haml)$})          { |m| "spec/#{m[1]}#{m[2]}_spec.rb" }
  watch(%r{^app/controllers/(.+)_(controller)\.rb$})  { |m| ["spec/routing/#{m[1]}_routing_spec.rb", "spec/#{m[2]}s/#{m[1]}_#{m[2]}_spec.rb", "spec/acceptance/#{m[1]}_spec.rb"] }
  watch(%r{^spec/support/(.+)\.rb$})                  { "spec" }
  watch("config/routes.rb")                           { "spec/routing" }
  watch("app/controllers/application_controller.rb")  { "spec/controllers" }

  watch(%r{^app/views/(.+)/.*\.(erb|slim|haml)$})          { |m| "spec/features/#{m[1]}_spec.rb" }
end

Step 3. Install Growl

Growl Notify

Step 4: Install Zeus

gem install zeus

Step 5. Start Zeus and Guard

zeus start
bundle exec guard