Uspec

Uspec is a shiny little testing framework for your apps!

Uspec is just Ruby!

• There's no need for special matchers
• You never have to worry that your tests lack assertions
• There is no monkey patching of core classes

No more digging around in your test framework's documentation to figure out what matcher you're supposed to use. Because you just use Ruby!

Uspec is well under 500 lines of code. Most of that is there to gracefully handle the weird edge cases that pop up all the time during development and testing of software. Uspec will catch issues at every stage and display a nicely formatted message to provide hints at what might have gone wrong.

Uspec is tiny, painless, and easy to use. Download it and give it a try!

Uspec is deceptively simple. You only need to remember one method: spec.

Writing a spec is easy:

spec 'AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name' do
  AwesomeMcCoolname.generate.include? 'Cool'
end

That's it!

1. Install in the typical way using Rubygems or Bundler:
   • gem install uspec
   • echo 'gem "uspec"' >> Gemfile && bundle install
2. Create a uspec directory to keep your specs in
3. Name your specs ending with _spec.rb
4. Write some specs in Ruby using the spec method (example above)
5. Use the included uspec executable to run your specs

And always remember that Uspec is just Ruby!

$ uspec --help
uspec - minimalistic ruby testing framework
usage: uspec [<file_or_path>...]

• Without arguments the uspec command will automatically look for a uspec directory and load any *_spec.rb files inside it.
• You can also pass in arbitrary files and it will attempt to run them as specs.
• If you pass in directories uspec will scan for and run any specs inside them.
• Uspec will return the number of failures as its exit status code to the or 0 if none.

Uspec's output is in beautiful ANSI technicolor, with red for failures, green for successes, and yellow for pending specs.

A brief explanation of uspec's output to show you what it can do!

If a spec passes (returns true):

 -- AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name: true

If a spec fails (returns false):

 -- AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name: false

If the spec encounters an error (raises an Exception):

 -- AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name: Exception

    Encountered an Exception while running spec
    in spec at uspec/awesome_mc_coolname_spec.rb:3: in `<main>'

    RuntimeError < StandardError: 'wtf'

    /Users/Dude/Projects/Awesome/lib/awesome_mc_coolname.rb:18:in `explode'
    uspec/awesome_mc_coolname_spec.rb:4:in `block in <main>'

If you create a spec that doesn't return a boolean value (nil doesn't count either!) like this:

spec 'AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name' do
  AwesomeMcCoolname.generate =~ /Badass/
end

Then Uspec will let you know so you can debug it:

 -- AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a badass name: Failed

    Spec did not return a boolean value
    in spec at uspec/awesome_mc_coolname_spec.rb:6: in `<main>'

    Integer < Numeric: 5

If you aren't ready to fill out a spec, maybe as a reminder to add functionality later, just leave off the block and it will be marked as pending:

spec 'a feature I have not implemented yet'

When you run the test Uspec will helpfully display:

 -- a feature I have not implemented yet: pending

Test code reuse doesn't require doing anything special. It's just like any other Ruby code. But here are a few examples!

Hint: A lot of people put require_relative 'spec_helper' at the top of their test files and put shared code and helper methods in a file called spec_helper.rb.

If you find yourself repeating the same code in tests several times you can extract that code into a method and then call it within your spec blocks.

def new_generator
  AwesomeMcCoolname.new max_length: 15
end

spec 'generates a cool name' do
  new_generator.generate.include? 'Badass'
end

This also works for instance variables!

@favorite_color = 'fuschia'

spec 'remembers favorite color' do
  ColorDB.fetch(:favorite) == @favorite_color
end

By combining the previous two capabilities of Ruby, it is trivial to memoize method output as well:

def reusable_generator
  @reusable_generator ||= AwesomeMcCoolname.new max_length: 15
end

spec 'generates a cool name' do
  reusable_generator.generate.include? 'Badass'
end

This is all the same kind of code that you use when writing any other Ruby object. You can put methods into objects and use those if you like too!

When the spec block is evaluated the return value is used (in a very Ruby-like way) to determine if the test has passed or failed. Standard Ruby comparisons are your friend!

Because there's no matchers and only one method there's no need for specialized reference documentation, but here are some ideas to get you going!

Instead of =~ (which returns either an Integer index or nil) Ruby has the nifty include? method, which returns a boolean:

spec 'AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name' do
  AwesomeMcCoolname.generate.include? 'Badass'
end

If you really need to regex, you can always use Ruby's !! idiom to coerce a boolean out of any result, but its more precise to specify the index if you know it. And you can always toss in an || to drop in more information if a comparison fails too:

spec 'AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name' do
  index = AwesomeMcCoolname.generate =~ /Badass/
  index == 0 || index
end

What if you want to test that an error has occured? Just use Ruby!

spec 'calling AwesomeMcCoolname.awesomeness without specifying the awesomeness level should explode' do
  begin
    AwesomeMcCoolname.awesomeness
  rescue ArgumentError => error
    error.message.include?("Needs awesomeness level!") || raise
  end
end

If there's no error, then Uspec will see the result of the method call (whatever it might be).

If the wrong Exception is raised, then because of reraising (by just calling raise without parameters), Ruby will dutifully pass along the error for Uspec to display.

Since uspec is a very straight forward testing utility it is easy to use any of the standard Ruby mocking frameworks with it. However, the Impasta gem was made specifically for simple but comprehensive mocking, stubbing, and spying.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Anthony M. Cook 2013-2024