Joe White’s Blog

Okay, an update to my previous Rake post. Rake does have some nice facilities for running tests, but the code I posted isn’t quite the right way to do it.

When you use rake/runtest, you should put the require inside your test task (inside each test task, if you have more than one). Like so:

# RIGHT
task :test do
  require 'rake/runtest'
  Rake.run_tests "**/*tests.rb"
end

# WRONG
require 'rake/runtest'
task :test do
  Rake.run_tests "**/*tests.rb"
end

The reason: the WRONG version will always (indirectly) require ‘test/unit’, which will always run your tests, even if you go through a code path that doesn’t register any.

Here’s what it looks like if you have the WRONG version and run rake -T (list all the interesting targets to the console, but don’t run any of them). Note that it’s running the tests, even though there aren’t any to run.

C:\svn\dgrok-r>rake -T
(in C:/svn/dgrok-r)
rake all  # Runs everything
Loaded suite c:/Program Files/ruby/bin/rake
Started

Finished in 0.0 seconds.

0 tests, 0 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

C:\svn\dgrok-r>

Here’s what it looks like if you use the RIGHT code above. It still runs the tests when you execute the “test” target, but when you’re not doing anything that involves test running, it doesn’t give you all that nonsense about how it ran 0 tests in 0.0 seconds:

C:\svn\dgrok-r>rake -T
(in C:/svn/dgrok-r)
rake all  # Runs everything

C:\svn\dgrok-r>

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 8:59 am and is filed under .NET, Delphi, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.