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Teaching RSpec to play nice with Rails
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Penelope Phippen
April 25, 2017
Technology
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Teaching RSpec to play nice with Rails
Presented at Railsconf 2017. Video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyPfrK1y1nc
Penelope Phippen
April 25, 2017
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Transcript
Teaching RSpec to play nice with Rails @samphippen
Friends, it’s good to be back
Last year I had a life threatening illness
None
A precious bag of ceftriaxone, saving my life
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Thanks @searls
Thanks @searls #samphippenisjustin searlsconfirmed
5.1
Yes*
ActionChatbox::TestCase
ActionDispatch ::BeliefSystemTestCase
Have some faith in us
5.1 has not been released yet
No changes required by you
Released soon in 3.6.0
No system test integration
but I would welcome a PR
RSpec + Rails
RSpec
RSpec isn’t a monolith
gem “rspec”, “~> 3.5”
Does nothing on it’s own
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Internal shared code
rspec-rails
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RSpec Rails
RSpec Rails our code Your rails version
gem “rspec”, “~> 3.5” gem “rspec-rails”, “~> 3.5”
gem “rspec-rails”, “~> 3.5”
Rails
Rails is a big complicated library
RSpec is extremely permissive about rails versions
>= 3.0
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Don’t ask
5
RSpec’s rails 5 compatability was not a smooth ride
Lesson 1: 5.0 means they break things
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Let’s just make sure this works with RSpec
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View specs don’t work
Specifically path helpers
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Switch back to working version of rails
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Work out what changed
controller .singleton_class .ancestors
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So we lost 3 random anonymous modules
WTF even are they?
actionpack-5.0.0.beta2/ lib/action_dispatch/ routing/route_set.rb:283
At this point we call in an emergency rails maintainer
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This is a huge win for collaboration
Lesson 2: Some bugs are in Rails
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What the hell is a signed cookie?
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So now the fun begins
git clone rails/rails
Point the app at that rails clone
git bisect bad
git checkout v4.2.0.beta4
git bisect good
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and then I left it for a while
and went to Rubyconf
“You have a breaking commit sha? Show me”
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“can be replicated purely with Rails using public API”
There exists a twisty turny maze of dependencies
Before filling an issue on a gem, check it’s not
in a dep
Lesson 3: Sometimes you can’t call in @sgrif
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“I made a short screencast”
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Do the bisect shimmy and shake
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Explaining a lot of context in a PR message is
super useful
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Gets merged!
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It is fine to poke a maintainer to close an
issue once they’ve fixed it
Summary
A lot of bugs that appear in RSpec can be
because of rails
Literally every fix we saw today was in a rails
gem
A Rails reproduction script is a great place to start
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I will almost always ask you for a reproduction sample
app
Just calling @sgrif is a great way to get rails
bugs fixed
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Working on open source is really hard
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This work represented 40+ hours of donated maintainer time
Hug a maintainer
Find some time to work on open source
Pay a maintainer?
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None
Thanks @samphippen
[email protected]
Let’s have some questions