RSpec‘s progress formatter (the one that produces output like ......F..*...FF....) produces very concise output – which is usually all anybody wants. But there’s a problem with that: if your tests are being run from hudson/jenkins and you want to watch the progress go by on the console screen, no output is displayed… until the output generates a newline character which only happens when a test fails. Annoying.

In order to force each test result to be displayed immediately in the console window, the result needs to include a newline character after either the ‘.‘, ‘F‘, or the ‘*‘. But output like that would be ugly. Adding the test name to the output would make the output look less ridiculous and would also let us know the results of individual tests immediately instead of having to wait for all the tests to finish. So I wrote an rspec formatter to do just that – it’s basiclly a rip-off of the progress formatter. Here it is:

To use it, save it to a file called ‘progress_with_names.rb‘, put it in your working directory and invoke it as explained below…

Example output

The progress_with_names formatter produces output like the following:

nat$ rspec test_spec.rb -f ProgressWithNames
. This should pass
F This should fail
* This should be pending

…which is way more informative (and hudson/jenkins friendly) than the corresponding progress formatter output:

nat$ rspec test_spec.rb
.F*

How to use from rake

A very simple rspec rake task that uses the progress_with_names formatter:

RSpec::Core::RakeTask.new do |t|
t.pattern = '**/*_spec.rb'
t.rspec_opts = ["-r", "./progress_with_names.rb", "-f", "ProgressWithNames"]
end


Example RSpec project

I’ve included a very simple rspec project that demonstrates the use of the formatter. Download it here, and then run:

rake spec

…to see the output!

Hope that helps…