Duoconsole

Launch Rails development console with test environment as a child process, so that you can run the test command from the Rails commands gem in your development console.

Example:

$ bundle exec duoconsole
Loading development environment (Rails 3.2.9)
irb(main):001:0> test 'unit/post'
Run options: --seed 28947

# Running tests:

.........

Finished tests in 0.358498s, 25.1047 tests/s, 50.2095 assertions/s.

9 tests, 18 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips
=> "Completed"
irb(main):002:0>

You can also run rake commands in the test environment via the testenv proxy:

irb(main):003:0> testenv.rake 'db:schema:load'

... loads the schema into the test database ...

=> "Completed"
irb(main):004:0>

See the Rails commands README for available commands and options.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'duoconsole', :group => :development

And then execute:

$ bundle

From the root of your project, instead of running rails console, run:

bundle exec duoconsole

When you start Duoconsole, you'll create two processes: the main process, which is running the Rails console in the development environment, and a child process that loads the app in the test environment. The parent process sends commands to the child process via a Unix socket.

The child process is created after Rails and all gems in Gemfile are required (via Bundler.require), so that this work only needs to be performed once.

The child process will fork its own child process for each test run, so that each run will exist in isolation, and can be easily aborted with ctrl-c. This runner process dies once tests are finished, or aborted.

The test command won't detect changes outside of your app/ directory, e.g. changes to files in lib/, config/, Gemfile etc. won't be picked up.

You'll need to exit and reload the console to pick up these changes.

Duoconsole has been tested on OS X on a Rails 4 app running on MRI Ruby 2.0.0 and a Rails 3.2 app running on MRI Ruby 1.9.3.

AFAIK this won't work on Windows or JRuby because of a lack of support for Kernel.fork.