Faster TDD with Stakeout.rb

  • Posted by Mike Naberezny in PHP,Ruby,Testing

    I’m a big fan of Autotest and it runs almost constantly on my machine. Autotest automatically reruns your tests whenever your files change. Instead of constantly flipping to another shell to rerun your tests, just let Autotest cheerfully do it for you in the background. It’s highly addictive.

    The only problem with Autotest is that it is specific to Ruby. I do a mix of different kinds of programming including Ruby, PHP, Python, and C. I’d like my TDD to be accelerated for all of these languages.

    Thanks to Geoffrey Grossenbach, last week I came across stakeout.rb from Mike Clark. This is a tiny, dead simple Ruby script that runs an arbitrary command when certain files change. This is a stripped-down Autotest for everybody else. I’m sure it has all kinds of other uses as well.

    To get started testing with stakeout.rb, you’ll need Ruby installed. Any recent version is fine and you might already have it installed. Next, grab the stakeout.rb script and add the shebang line to the top (Unix-like OS assumed):

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby -w

if ARGV.size < 2
  puts "Usage: stakeout.rb  [files to watch]+"
...

    Make the file executable and put it somewhere in your PATH. You can test it out by typing stakeout.rb from an arbitrary directory and you should see the help message.

    Next, change over to a project directory where you have some test files. Most of the projects that I am involved with tend to use some directory structure similar to this:

    /project_name
  /lib
  /test
  ...

    To test such a project, run stakeout.rb from the /project_name directory. Most PHP projects using PHPUnit tend to have an AllTests.php file or equivalent to run all the tests, so we’ll assume this for the example:

    project_name$ stakeout.rb "php test/AllTests.php" **/*

    The first argument is what command to run when the tests change. The second argument, and any subsequent arguments, are the files to watch for changes. These can use a Ruby globbing pattern. The pattern **/* will watch all files under project_name recursively, which includes lib/ and test/.

    Once stakeout.rb is run, it will show no output but will sit and wait for changes. As soon as you change a watched file, stakeout.rb will automatically rerun you tests and will continue to do so until you exit with Control-C.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 8:45 am and is filed under PHP, Ruby, Testing.