Micro setup for minitest in rails#

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:27:16 +0000

I think this is the bare minimum setup for being able to write Minitest::Spec tests in a Rails 3.1 app, and certainly a lot simpler than all that faffage with minitest-rails and stuff

• add the line require 'minitest/spec' somewhere near the top of test/test_helper.rb

• write tests that look something like this:

  require 'test_helper'
  require 'edition'
   
  describe Edition do
    it "ex nihilo nihil fit" do
      nil.must_be_nil
    end
  end
  

• we don't create generators, but really, why do you need a generator to add one line of code? To disable the builtin Test::Unit generators - which you may as well because in this context they're useless, add

    config.generators do |g|
      g.test_framework nil
    end

inside YourApp::Application in config/application.rb

This is all pretty vanilla - it doesn't do spork or any of the faster-testing-through-not-loading-the-framework stuff, but with those three simple steps you can run rake test:units just as you would with the default Test::Unit stuff. test:foo for other values of foo appears also to work, but I don't have any integration tests in this project yet so don't take my word for it.

Double Trouble

I can see no way in minitest to create a partial mock: viz. a real object with some but not all methods mocked. In fact I can see no documented way in minitest to do any kind of mocking at all. As the new fashionable Double Ruby (a.k.a. rr ) library scores highly on both these counts, I decided to use that too.

This is a simple matter of adding "rr" to the Gemfile, then amending test/test_helper.rb to include the lines

require 'rr'

and

class MiniTest::Unit::TestCase
  include RR::Adapters::MiniTest
end