TConsole

TConsole is a testing console for Rails. It allows you to issue commands concerning what tests to run, and see their test output. It's also got a helpful reload command for when your Rails environment needs to be restarted.

TConsole should work in pretty much any Unix environment and will work with apps running Ruby 1.9. It can be run on pretty much any test suite that uses MiniTest, including Rails test suites (though MiniTest::Spec isn't supported, unfortunately).

It was written by Alan Johnson, who passed maintainership over to Graham Ashton in July 2013.

There's a quick screencast on Vimeo about TConsole's basic features: Meet TConsole!

• A large amount of time is wasted loading the Rails environment each time you run the Rails testing rake tasks. TConsole loads the environment when you start the console and whenever you reload the environment, but doesn't have to reload the environment for each test execution.
• The Rails rake task syntax bundle exec rake test:units TEST=test/unit/user_test.rb can be pretty verbose when you're running specific tests. Yeah, there are tricks you can use to shorten things up, but still, that's crazy long. tconsole lets you just type test/unit/user_test.rb to get that specific test file to run. With TConsole you can just type UserTest and the test runs!
• TConsole makes it dead simple to review how long your tests are taking to run and pinpoint your slowest running tests.
• Re-running failed tests is as easy as typing !failed with TConsole.

Spork's really cool, and it was my primary motivation behind writing tconsole, but I've always felt like having an extra console open for my spork server and another to run my commands is a bit heavy for what I want to do. Beyond that, I couldn't ever figure out how to get Spork to work with test/unit, and since me and DHH are the only two people who still use test/unit I figured it was up to me to come up with something that worked great. If Spork's your cup of tea, though, stop reading this and use what you like.

We've decided to focus on integrating with MiniTest as tightly as possible, rather than worrying about rspec support.

gem install tconsole

Prereleases of TConsole come out pretty frequently. You can install the latest prerelease version with:

gem install tconsole --pre

If you're using bundler, you probably want to simply add TConsole to your Gemfile:

gem "tconsole"

In your shell of choice, cd into your Rails project's directory and then run bundle exec tconsole to fire up the console. You should see something like this:

bundle exec tconsole

Loading your Rails environment...
Environment loaded in 7.160264s.

>

Now that you're in the console, let's test out the all command! Running all from the console runs all of your unit, functional, and integration tests:

> all
Running tests...

Run options:

# Running tests:

....................................................................................

Finished tests in 6.054574s, 6.4999 tests/s, 10.5822 assertions/s.

39 tests, 45 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

Test time (including load): 82.806741s

>

If you want to focus in on a particular subset of your tests, like units, functionals, or integration, just enter that keyword:

> units

> functionals

> integration

You can also specify to run all tests in a specific class:

> UserTest

You can dig a bit deeper and just run a particular test in that file as well:

> UserTest#test_that_user_is_healthy

You can list more than just one class or class and method to run, and TConsole will run them all.

> UserTest InvoiceTest SubscriptionTest#test_that_renew_renews_the_subscription

There are a few special ! commands that use data from past test runs. The !failed command will rerun the set of tests that failed during the last run:

> !failed

There's also a !timings command that will show you a listing of your last test run's test times, sorted to help you improve slow tests:

> !timings

Timings from last run:

0.042632s PostTest#test_new_post_should_not_be_published
0.033892s PostTest#test_post_should_have_a_title
0.033134s PostsControllerTest#test_can_reach_all_posts
0.007098s PostsControllerTest#test_grabs_posts
0.006212s PostsControllerTest#test_displays_published_posts_by_default
0.006107s PostTest#test_post_cannot_have_an_empty_body
0.002197s PostTest#test_post_should_have_a_publish_date_set_when_published
0.001937s PostTest#test_post_cannot_have_an_empty_title
0.001232s PostTest#test_post_should_have_an_initial_state
0.001128s PostTest#test_post's_state_should_change_when_published
0.001056s PostTest#test_returning_only_published_posts
0.000923s PostTest#test_post_should_have_respond_to_published_appropriately
0.000770s PostTest#test_post_should_have_a_body

You can turn on the Fail Fast feature to cause TConsole to stop running tests as soon as the first test fails. To enable fail fast simply enter:

set fast on

In the console. You can disable Fail Fast again with:

set fast off

If you update your environment, maybe by editing your Gemfile or changing one of your application's configuration files, you can use the reload command to reload the entire environment:

> reload

And then finally, you can run the exit command to quit:

> exit

Since TConsole is primarily meant to be run as an interactive console, it doesn't have many command line arguments, but there are a few. TConsole also passes any parameters that it doesn't know through to be run as its initial command. So, for example:

> tconsole all

passes all through as the first command to be run, so that command would start TConsole and immediately run all tests. There's a --once option that can be used if you'd simply like to run a single command by passing it to the TConsole command in then exit.

The only other TConsole command line option is --trace. --trace is primarily useful for diagnosing problems with TConsole.

TConsole attempts to load a .tconsole file in your home directory and in your project directory, in that order, to configure your preferred defaults for TConsole. In many situations you won't need to edit your TConsole configuration files to run TConsole, because it includes a sane set of defaults and attempts to auto-detect Rails applications.

Here's a commented example configuration file:

TConsole::Config.run do |config|
  # Configures the directory where your tests are located
  config.test_dir = "./test"

  # Include paths that should be added to Ruby's load path
  config.include_paths = ["./test", "./lib"]

  # Paths that should be preloaded. You'll have to run the reload
  # command to reload these paths in TConsole
  config.preload_paths = ["./config/application"]

  # File sets are the named sets of files that can be executed. A file
  # set named "all" must be included.
  config.file_sets = {
    "all" => ["test/**/*_test.rb"],
    "units" => ["test/units/**/*_test.rb"]
  }

  # Fail fast specifies whether or not tests should stop executing once
  # the first failure occurs.
  config.fail_fast = true

  # Specifies code to be run before loading the environment
  config.before_load do
    ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= "test"
  end

  # Specifies code to be run after loading the environment
  config.after_load do
    ::Rails.application
    ::Rails::Engine.class_eval do
      def eager_load!
        # turn off eager_loading
      end
    end
  end

  # Specifies code to be run before each test execution
  config.before_test_run do
    puts "I'm about to run!!!"
  end
end

Feel free to report issues in the issue tracker at https://github.com/gma/tconsole/issues. Be sure to include the versions of Ruby, Rails, and your operating system. For bonus points, fork the project and send me a pull request with the fix for the issue you're seeing.

How embarrassing?!?! A testing tool with no tests? At first TConsole was just a bit of experimental code, so test coverage is light. I am working on improving that, though.

Copyright (c) 2012 Alan Johnson

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