RSpec

RSpec is a Behaviour Driven Development framework with tools to express User Stories with Executable Scenarios and Executable Examples at the code level.

RSpec ships with several modules:

Spec::Story provides a framework for expressing User Stories

Spec::Example provides a framework for expressing code Examples

Spec::Matchers provides Expression Matchers for use with Spec::Expectations and Spec::Mocks.

Spec::Expectations supports setting expectations on your objects so you can do things like: 

  result.should equal(expected_result)

Spec::Mocks supports creating Mock Objects, Stubs, and adding Mock/Stub behaviour to your existing objects.

Installation

The simplest approach is to install the gem: 

  gem install -r rspec #mac users must sudo

Building the RSpec gem

If you prefer to build the gem locally, check out source from svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/trunk. Then do the following: 

  rake gem
  gem install pkg/rspec-0.x.x.gem (you may have to sudo)

Running RSpec‘s specs

In order to run RSpec‘s full suite of specs (rake pre_commit) you must install the following gems:

  • rake # Runs the build script
  • rcov # Verifies that the code is 100% covered by specs
  • webby # Generates the static HTML website
  • syntax # Required to highlight ruby code
  • diff-lcs # Required if you use the —diff switch
  • win32console # Required by the —colour switch if you‘re on Windows
  • meta_project # Required in order to make releases at RubyForge
  • heckle # Required if you use the —heckle switch
  • hpricot # Used for parsing HTML from the HTML output formatter in RSpec‘s own specs

Once those are all installed, you should be able to run the suite with the following steps:

  • svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/trunk rspec
  • cd rspec
  • rake install_dependencies
  • cd example_rails_app
  • export RSPEC_RAILS_VERSION=1.2.3
  • rake rspec:generate_mysql_config
  • mysql -u root < db/mysql_setup.sql
  • cd ..
  • rake pre_commit

Note that RSpec itself - once built - doesn‘t have any dependencies outside the Ruby core and stdlib - with a few exceptions:

  • The spec command line uses diff-lcs when —diff is specified.
  • The spec command line uses heckle when —heckle is specified.
  • The Spec::Rake::SpecTask needs RCov if RCov is enabled in the task.

See rspec.info for further documentation.

Contributing