Specdiff

Specdiff is an opinionated gem that provides diffing between arbitrary data. It was built in an effort to improve WebMock's and RSpec's diff output, and comes with integrations for both. It produces output that looks very similiar to RSpec, but with better support for nested hash/array structures.

By default, specdiff will produce diff output for multiline text by using diff-lcs:

It also diffs hashes and arrays:

Hashdiff based hash diff	Text based hash diff

Specdiff will automatically switch between these two types of hash/array diff output depending on what it thinks is more readable. The first type of output showcased here comes from the hashdiff gem, one of specdiff's dependencies. The other is the text diff run on the output of hashprint. Specdiff switches to using hashprint/text diff when it estimates that a lot of the keys changed names, which is a point of weakness for hashdiff's output.

Specdiff is tested to work with:

• Ruby >= 3.0.
• RSpec 3.13.0, 3.12.2, 3.12.0.
• WebMock 3.19.1, 3.18.1.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "specdiff", require: false

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Put the following in the initializer for your test environment (spec_helper.rb):

require "specdiff" # may be unneccessary if you're using bundler to load your gems
require "specdiff/rspec" # optional, enables RSpec integration
require "specdiff/webmock" # optional, enables WebMock integration
Specdiff.load!(:json) # optional, automatically detects json and uses the hash differ on it

Specdiff.configure do |config|
  config.colorize = true # toggles color output
end

The monkey-patches should go after the gems they are patching.

This gem is intended for use in test environments, not production or release environments.

Specdiff has two integrations: WebMock and RSpec. These are the main way specdiff is intended to be used.

The RSpec integration improves on RSpec's built in diffing functionality by diffing nested hash/array structures with hashdiff. This produces clearer output when deeply nested structures are involved:

Test source	RSpec's diff	Specdiff's diff

In some cases specdiff may produce a text-based diff of deeply nested hashes or arrays instead. This also represents an improvement over RSpec's text-based diff of nested hashes/arrays, by virtue of custom pretty-printing code designed for the text differ to work on:

Test source	RSpec's diff	Specdiff's diff

The RSpec integration also prevents RSpec from truncating your data before printing it (by replacing the inspect implementation), avoiding the necessity of a diff in some instances:

RSpec truncating your data	Specdiff preventing truncation

(Although this is an instance where a "word diff" would be more helpful)

WebMock already ships with a dependency on hashdiff, providing diffs of json request stubs. Specdiff prints hashdiff's output differently, and does not require the content type to be specified:

(This requires you to enable the json plugin)

Source	WebMock	Specdiff

With specdiff enabled you also get text diffs where previously there were none:

Source	WebMock	Specdiff

The WebMock integration continues to respect the show_body_diff setting in WebMock:

# this will cause diffs to not be produced, regardless of whether specdiff is
# loaded. body diffs are enabled by default in WebMock so you don't need to
# touch this.
WebMock.hide_body_diff!

It is also possible to call into specdiff with arbitrary data. This is essentially what the integrations do for you. This is suitable if you are developing a library and intend to depend on specdiff for diff output.

# Generate a diff, using all plugins available.
diff = Specdiff.diff(something, anything)

diff.empty? # => true/false, if true you probably don't want to actually show the diff
diff.to_s # => a String for showing to a developer who may or may not be scratching their head

# Generate an indented, pretty-printed string representation of a ruby hash.
printed_hash = Specdiff.hashprint(my_big_nested_hash)
printed_hash # => String

# Inspect something, but with prettier output for certain classes
# (Time/DateTime/BigDecimal). This is not indented. Usually defers to #inspect.
specdiff_inspected = Specdiff.diff_inspect(something)
specdiff_inspected # => String

Any methods or properties not documented here are considered private implementation details.

It is possible to create and load plugins into specdiff to customize Specdiff's behaviour. This was implemented in case you have special needs (e.g. diffing things other than text, hashes, arrays and json).

The built-in json plugin is optional, and loaded like so:

Specdiff.load!(:json)

The JSON plugin attempts to parse strings into json using JSON.parse. If successful, it considers that string a json, and will use the parse result as if it had been passed directly to specdiff in the first place.

While other plugins are loaded by simply passing them to ::load!:

class MySpecdiffPlugin
  # Read the source code to figure out how plugins work. Sorry.
end

Specdiff.load!(MySpecdiffPlugin)

This was intended to allow implementing (potentially janky and inefficient) plugins to help diff XML, but in practice the text differ was good enough for diffing indented XML.

Read DEVELOPMENT.md for current development practices.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/odinhb/specdiff.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.