bitmonkey

In the course of normal development I find myself focusing on specific tests that I want to make sure work properly before moving on to testing the entire test suite.

There is a really great argument to test/unit called --name which will allow you to specify the test to run.

The test/unit rake tasks provide the TESTOPTS environment variable as a means to pass options to the tests runner. To run a specific test we can add our --name option to TESTOPTS like this:

$ rake test:units TEST=test/unit/user_test.rb TESTOPTS="--name=test_should_create_user"

The --name option even takes a regular expression, so we can even do this:

$ rake test:units TEST=test/unit/user_test.rb TESTOPTS="--name='/create_user/'"

Because it’s a pain in the ass to remember the option as well as doing the right amount of escaping and quoting, I created a simple rake task that you can have run before your real test tasks to set TESTOPTS for you. It looks in the TESTNAME environment variable and if it exists, sets TESTOPTS with the correct value.

To pull this off, you can just put the following in lib/tasks/test_name.rake:

namespace :test do
  task :populate_testopts do
    if ENV['TESTNAME'].present?
      ENV['TESTOPTS']  = ENV['TESTOPTS'] ? "#{ENV['TESTOPTS']} " : ''
      ENV['TESTOPTS'] += "--name=#{ENV['TESTNAME'].inspect}"
    end    
  end
end

%w(test:units test:functionals test:integration).each do |task_name|
  Rake::Task[task_name].prerequisites << 'test:populate_testopts'
end

You can find the gist here.

The only thing tricky about this code is that we go and stick an entry in the prerequisites array that each Rake::Task has to make sure that it runs our environment filter code before it runs the task itself.

Once we’ve done that, we can run the tests we want with:

$ rake test:units TEST=test/unit/user_test.rb TESTNAME='/create_user/'