run your tests fast with spork

Running tests sometimes may take long time. In the post I’ll explain how to reduce the time spent to run tests. For this purpose there is a nice tool called spork. Spork forks a copy of the server each time you run your tests. To use spork in your Rails application first you should add it to your Gemfile:

...

group :test do
  ...
  gem 'spork', '~> 1.0rc'
  ...
end

...

Or certainly you can use gem install command as well. Then run bundle install. After installing the gem you should configure it. In this post I will show configuration with rspec, therefor you should have rspec among your gems. To configure spork with rspec run the following command(you should be in your application main directory).

spork rspec --bootstrap

Now your app’s spec_helper.rb file should be as following:

require 'rubygems'
require 'spork'
#uncomment the following line to use spork with the debugger
#require 'spork/ext/ruby-debug'

Spork.prefork do
  # Loading more in this block will cause your tests to run faster. However,
  # if you change any configuration or code from libraries loaded here, you'll
  # need to restart spork for it take effect.


  # This file is copied to spec/ when you run 'rails generate rspec:install'
  ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'test'
  require File.expand_path("../../config/environment", __FILE__)
  require 'rspec/rails'

  # Requires supporting ruby files with custom matchers and macros, etc,
  # in spec/support/ and its subdirectories.
  Dir[Rails.root.join("spec/support/**/*.rb")].each {|f| require f}
end
Spork.each_run do
  # This code will be run each time you run your specs.

end

# instructions will be here

RSpec.configure do |config|
# == Mock Framework
#
# If you prefer to use mocha, flexmock or RR, uncomment the appropriate line:
#
# config.mock_with :mocha
# config.mock_with :flexmock
# config.mock_with :rr
config.mock_with :rspec

config.before(:suite) do
DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
end

config.before(:each) do
DatabaseCleaner.start
#load "#{Rails.root}/db/seeds.rb"
end

config.after(:each) do
DatabaseCleaner.clean
end

end

Then read all the instructions. As noted in instructions we should move all appropriate loading to spork each block. So our new spec_helper.rb file should be as below:

require 'rubygems'
require 'spork'
#uncomment the following line to use spork with the debugger
#require 'spork/ext/ruby-debug'

Spork.prefork do
  # Loading more in this block will cause your tests to run faster. However,
  # if you change any configuration or code from libraries loaded here, you'll
  # need to restart spork for it take effect.


  # This file is copied to spec/ when you run 'rails generate rspec:install'
  ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'test'
  require File.expand_path("../../config/environment", __FILE__)
  require 'rspec/rails'

  # Requires supporting ruby files with custom matchers and macros, etc,
  # in spec/support/ and its subdirectories.
  Dir[Rails.root.join("spec/support/**/*.rb")].each {|f| require f}

  RSpec.configure do |config|
    # == Mock Framework
    #
    # If you prefer to use mocha, flexmock or RR, uncomment the appropriate line:
    #
    # config.mock_with :mocha
    # config.mock_with :flexmock
    # config.mock_with :rr
    config.mock_with :rspec

    config.before(:suite) do
      DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
    end

    config.before(:each) do
      DatabaseCleaner.start
      #load "#{Rails.root}/db/seeds.rb"
    end

    config.after(:each) do
      DatabaseCleaner.clean
    end

  end
end

Spork.each_run do
  # This code will be run each time you run your specs.

end

Now start your spork server via spork command and it will let you run your rspec tests faster by providing –drb command : rspec –drb spec/

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run your tests fast with spork