How to stop autotest/autospec from testing the entire project on a red to green transition

sam — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:52:04 +0000

When developing a new module using TDD, I like to first write a failing test, then write the code to make the test pass, then repeat ad-nauseum. If you are using autospec/autotest – which I love in general – it has this annoying habit of running the entire suite of tests on any red to green transition. This is quite inconvenient when you are rapidly iterating between red and green and your entire suite of tests takes a while to run.

So what I do is disable this behavior. It will only run the entire suite of tests in response to a Ctrl-C. Otherwise it will just test things that have changed. To do this comment out the following line (or do something that has that effect – personally I put an unless ENV['AUTOTEST_DONT_RUN_ENTIRE_SUITE_ON_RED_TO_GREEN_TRANSITION'] on the end of it): In /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/ZenTest-3.11.0/lib/autotest.rb

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# Comment out this line to disable a full test-suite run on every red->green transition.
# self.tainted = true unless self.files_to_test.empty?

Autotest in color

sam — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:37:29 +0000

For completeness: to install ZenTest Autotest:

sudo gem install ZenTest

Autotest will display a red/green bar after running tests, if you add this line to ~/.autotest

require 'autotest/redgreen'

More plugins are described here, but this appears to be the only one that works out of the box.

Sam Pierson's Blog » autotest

How to stop autotest/autospec from testing the entire project on a red to green transition

Autotest in color