Hello world: Introducing RSpactor

Mar 11, 2008 | 9 comments

This is my first post at rubyphunk.com, so let me welcome you all: ‘Hello World’. Along with this initial post goes the release of a first version (0.2.0) of RSpactor.

RSpactor?

RSpactor is a little command line tool to automatically run your changed specs (much like autotest). As you may expect, it concentrates on the use of RSpec. It was especially designed to use filesystem events like FSEvent on Leopard (MacOS 10.5) instead of permanently polling a directory structure. RSpactor is currently only working on Mac OS 10.5. But hey: I’m very confident that the next version of RSpactor will work on Linux boxes, too.

Features

  • Application agnostic: RSpactor can be used with any ruby project
  • Subdirectory agnostic: RSpactor is capable of running all specs under a specific subdirectory
  • RSpactor uses system events (fast and polite to your box)
  • Growl integration

Dependencies & Limitations

Due to its design of using FSEvent, it is currently limited to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) only. RSpactor requires RubyCocoa, that is shipped with Leopard. Furthermore it expects your “spec/” directory to be located directly under the root of your project.

Installation & Usage

Setup: sudo gem install rspactor
Run: cd /path/to/your/app/or/subdir/of/your/app && rspactor

Perspective

This is a very “draft” and early version if RSpactor. Please don’t expect it to work without any failures. If you have any ideas or may want to contribute, just drop me a line. The next release comes with polished source, linux support and specs (I’m aware of the fact, that RSpactor is a test-runner that doesn’t even contain one single spec :-) ).

Project page and bug tracker

Comment by: dvd

It's missing osx/foundation (part of rubycocoa I guess)... can rspactor work with a macports ruby?

Comment by: rubyphunk

This should work out of the box, yes.. Anyway, you can install osx/foundation (yes its part of RubyCocoa) by hand. I have written a little guide about that: http://rubyphunk.com/2008/3/18/getting-rubycocoa-on-your-mac

Comment by: Pelle

Thanks for this. I love it. This was a truly needed app. The sound of my disks being polled constantly was driving me nuts.

Comment by: Vitor Pellegrino

It's definitely a very promising project. Unfortunately i could not get it running correctly in my current setup. One of the directories of my path to my app has a space into its name so rspactor could not find my project's root. When i removed that space it worked gracefully. Anyway, congratulations for this great piece of app!

Comment by: Vitor Pellegrino

It's definitely a very promising project. Unfortunately i could not get it running correctly in my current setup. One of the directories of my path to my app has a space into its name so rspactor could not find my project's root. When i removed that space it worked gracefully. Anyway, congratulations for this great piece of app!

Comment by: rubyphunk

@Vitor: Thanks for your comment :) I will have to check and fix that one

Comment by: Ingo Weiss

Love it - works like a charm for me. The feedback it provides feels much more immediate than when using autotest which already makes a big difference. Add to that the greatly decreased CPU/disk usage and you have a real winner. Well done!!

Comment by: David

thank you. autotest was not being kind to my machine. this is the tits. thank you. is there a way to change the image that pops up in the growl notification? thanks again

Comment by: rubyphunk

I'm going to implement this feature in the RSpactor.app version, but not for the gem. If you want to change the image for the gem version you will have to replace the rails.png image in the gems installation folder..

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