Has anyone seen this problem before? Sometimes when running specs for my Rails 3.2.14 project rspec seems to finish as usual:
Finished in 1.27 seconds
6 examples, 2 failures
Failed examples:
rspec ./spec/models/my_spec.rb:123 # Hello world 1
rspec ./spec/models/my_spec.rb:234 # Hello world 2
but then it just hangs there and won't let me continue working in that shell. I can kill -9 the process from another terminal tab, or just start a new shell and run the tests again there, but it makes test driven development a huge pain.
When I restart my computer, the problem goes away for a while, but it always happens again eventually. After it hangs once, it keeps hanging every time I run rspec, even if I run different tests in a different project. The same tests in the same projects pass just fine on my coworkers' computers every time.
I'm not sure what information would help to answer this question so let me know if there is something I should add to this post. I'm running ruby 2.0.0p195 and rails 3.2.14. I've got Mac OS 10.7.5. I use zsh and rbenv.
Thanks for reading!
I had the same issue and solved it by adding the following to my spec_helper.rb:
SimpleCov.start do
use_merging false
end
Note that I'm running on a virtual box vm with a synched directory.
Here's the explanation I found as to why this works:
"When simplecov exists, by default it will try to merge the recorded coverage with what's on disk. To avoid corruption it uses a lock file to guard this merge. Because my virtual box shared fs is not actually posix compliant, the lock file would never acquire, and silently block forever here.
Since I don't care about merging coverage results, the solution for me was to simply disable this behavior with the use_merging flag."
https://gist.github.com/k-yamada/3930916
Ok, figured it out with a friend's help. All it took was removing SimpleCov from my spec_helper. Not sure why SimpleCov was causing the issue, but I'll post an update here if I find out.
I am using Specjour v0.4.1 for full test suite runs and preloading a rails app to run individual specs with Spork and Guard. Specjour uses multiple workers (usually 4) to run tests simultaneously.
How can I pass the preloaded application to each one of these workers? As specjour continues to load the application for each worker.
Note: rspec spec/models/example_spec.rb --drb is used to force rspec to use the preloaded application.
I've forked specjour and tried to push the --drb flag to each worker using several methods with no success. Any insight would appreciated. Thanks!
Note: hooks.rb configuration seems promising (mentioned in the README), however, documentation is extremely slim.
I'm looking for the quickest way to run unit tests for a rails app on a Windows machine, preferably automatically. My environment is:
Ruby 1.8.7
Rails 3.0.9
ZenTest 3.6.0 (the latest versions 4.6.2/4.5.0 failed when I tried them for some reason)
Currently they run very slowly, eg. 30s to run a suite of 12 very simple unit tests, time mostly spent starting ruby it seems. The tests themselves take 5s to run according to autotest. For someone used to running 100s of tests in 10s, this is agony, and makes TDD infeasible. I'd even be happy if I could re-run one unit test in less than 5s...
I've searched other questions. Some are old and some conflict. What's the latest accepted wisdom on this? Here are the suggestions I'm aware of:
Use faster_require and/or faster_gem_script (though I had problems getting this working...)
Try JRuby (though that seems as slow starting?)
Upgrade ruby to 1.9.x
spork?
doze?
rails-dev-boost?
Getting a Linux box (or VMware) is out of the question at present, though getting more tempting...
You may want to look at something like spork (and a blog entry).
I write my tests using rspec and I have had great success making my tests run much faster with spork. The reasons tests rails tests run so slowly is because of the amount of time it takes to load rails and all the other gems that you use in your app.
If you can also upgrade to ruby 1.9.2 that would be quite useful.
I would like my development environment for Rails to automatically start redis and resque (and potentially in other projects, mongod, mysql-server etc.) for me, in the following cases:
When starting up the development server rails server.
Additionally, it would be nice if the following cases detect already running services, and, if not running start them up too:
Rake rspec, rspec /spec, when running tests.
When starting up a rails console.
When shutting down the rails server, the started child-services should be shut down too.
What is the correct place for such additional startup scripts?
And how to avoid them being started in production too (where I run everything trough /etc/init.d services)?
A lot of these built-in tasks are available as rake tasks already.
You can create a master rake task that does it all.
For example, with resque, you get "rake resque:start" "rake resque:scheduler:start", etc.
You can create a generic "start" task that depends on the rest. Similarly, a "stop" task would shut everything down.
So you would do:
rake start # starts all associated processes
rake stop # stops them all
This is also very use to use from Capistrano, when you end up deploying your code somewhere else. Rake tasks are very easy to call from Capistrano.
I think it's really better to do that in some external script. Do it in your rails server command can be really annoying to anyone to try your code.
By example, in one year, a nez developper come to your project. He can be desoriented if your rails server commande launch a such of other application in background.
In same idea, if you do that you need maintain your code in your rails env. Can be a little tricky. Maintain an independant script can be more usefull.
You can add your script in script directory. That be a good pratice. But not when you launch a command with a manual who do not that.
Whenever I run rspec tests for my Rails application it takes forever and a day of overhead before it actually starts running tests. Why is rspec so slow? Is there a way to speed up Rails' initial load or single out the part of my Rails app I need (e.g. ActiveRecord stuff only) so it doesn't load absolutely everything to run a few tests?
I definitely suggest checking out spork.
http://spork.rubyforge.org/
The railstutorial specifically addresses this, and gives a workaround to get spork running nicely in rails 3.0 (as of this moment, spork is not rails 3 ready out of the box). Of course, if you're not on rails 3.0, then you should be good to go.
The part of the tutorial showing how to get spork running in rails 3.0
http://railstutorial.org/chapters/static-pages#sec:spork
Checking when spork is rails 3.0 ready
http://www.railsplugins.org/plugins/440-spork
You should be able to to speed up your script/spec calls by running script/spec_server in a separate terminal window, then adding the additional -X parameter to your spec calls.
Why is rspec so slow? because it loads all the environement, loads fixtures and all that jazz.
Is there a way to speed up Rails' initial load you could try using mocks instead of relying on the database, this is actually correct for unit testing and will definitly speed up your unit tests. Additionnaly using the spec server as mentionned by #Scott Matthewman can help, same with the autotest from zentest mentionned by #Marc-Andre Lafortune
Is there a way to single out the part of my Rails app I need (e.g. ActiveRecord stuff only) so it doesn't load absolutely everything to run a few tests? what about this
rake test:recent
I am not sure how the rspec task integrate with this but you could definitely use the test:recent task as a template to do the same with rspec tests if the.
rake test:rspec:recent
doesn't exist yet
because it loads all the environement, loads fixtures and all that jazz.
The real culprit is if you run it using rake spec, it runs the db:test:prepare task.
This task drops your entire test database and re-creates it from scratch. This seems ridiculous to me, but that's what it does (the same thing happens when you run rake:test:units etc).
You can easily work around this using the spec application which rspec installs as part of the rspec gem.
Like this:
cd railsapp
spec spec # run all specs without rebuilding the whole damn database
spec spec/models # run model specs only
cd spec
spec controllers/user* # run specs for controllers that start with user
I think the "zen" experience you're looking for is to run spec_server and autospec in the background, with the result being near-instant tests when you save a file.
However, I'm having problems getting these two programs to communicate.
I found an explanation here:
I've noticed that autotest doesn't send commands to the spec_server.
Instead it reloads the entire Rails environment and your application's
plugins everytime it executes. This causes autotest to run
significantly slower than script server, because when you run the
script/spec command the specs are sent to the spec_server which
already has your Rails environment fired up and ready to go. If you
happen to install a new plugin or something like that, then you'll
have to restart the spec_server.
But, how do we fix this issue? I'm guessing it would involve downloading ZenTest and changing code for the autotest program, but don't have time to try it out right now.
Are you running this over Rails? If so, it's not RSpec's initialization that's slow, it's Rails'. Rails has to initialize the entire codebase and yours before running the specs. Well, it doesn't have to, but it does. RSpec runs pretty fast for me under my small non-rails projects.
Running tests can be really slow because the whole rails environment has to load (try script/console) and only then can all tests run. You should use autotest which keeps the environment loaded and will check which files you edit. When you edit and save a file, only the tests that depend on these will run automatically and quickly.
If you're using a Mac I recommend using Rspactor over autotest as it uses a lot fewer resources for polling changed files than autotest. There is both a full Cocoa version
RSpactor.app
or the gem version that I maintain at Github
sudo gem install pelle-rspactor
While these don't speed up individual rspec tests, they feel much faster as they auto run the affected spec's within a second of you hitting save.
As of rspec-rails-1.2.7, spec_server is deprecated in favor of the spork gem.
The main reason is that require takes forever on windows, for some reason.
Tips for speedup:
spork now works with windows, I believe.
You can try "faster_require" which caches locations:
http://github.com/rdp/faster_require
GL.
-rp
If you are on a Windows environment then there is probably little you can do as Rails seems to startup really slowly under Windows. I had the same experience on Windows and had to move my setup to a Linux VM to make it really zippy (I was also using autotest).