Quick Tip: Bash Script for Running RSpec Tests Under Rails

This will be specific to our particular setup but could easily be adapted for other similar use cases.

Basically, I got tired of typing:

$ rake spec SPEC=spec/acceptance/path/to/file.rb SPEC_OPTS='--line 42'

…in order to re-run a single test after attempting to fix it. The rspec output gives a stack trace that shows the file/line number the failure occured on, like this:

./spec/acceptance/path/to/file.rb:42

So I made a bash script that lets me just copy that line and then run

$ test [pasted line]

and it will run the test again. Here it is:

function test() {
   local a1="$1"
   local a2="$2"
   if [[ $1 == *:* ]]; then arr=(${1//:/ }); a1="${arr[0]}"; a2="${arr[1]}"; fi;
   local spec="$a1"
   if [ -n "$a2" ]; then local opts="--line ${a2}"; fi;
   if [ -z "$opts" ]; then
     echo rake spec SPEC=${spec}
     bundle exec rake spec SPEC=${spec}
   else
     echo rake spec SPEC=${spec} SPEC_OPTS="${opts}"
     bundle exec rake spec SPEC=${spec} SPEC_OPTS="${opts}"
   fi
 }

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