Getting Guard tests to run AUTOMATICALLY

rubyonrails-talk
1

I’m going through Hartl’s Rails tutorial, which now uses Rails 4.2 and Guard with minitest.

Having Guard up and running does not automatically run tests; I have to press Enter to trigger the tests.

I can get the tests to run automatically upon starting Guard by changing “guard :minitest, spring: true, all_on_start: false do” in the Guardfile to “guard :minitest, spring: true do”. (This change means that the all_on_start parameter is set to true by default.)

How can I get the tests to run automatically when I modify files in the app? While I don’t need this automatic testing to get through railstutorial.org, I want to have this capability for working on more serious apps. I’d like the tests to begin BEFORE I click on the terminal window that I have dedicated to Guard testing.

2

you need some watch directives in the Guardfile, like so:

guard :rspec, cmd: ‘bundle exec rspec’ do

watch(%r{^spec/support/(.+).rb$}) { “spec” }

watch(‘spec/spec_helper.rb’) { “spec” }

watch(%r{^spec/.+_spec.rb$})

watch(%r{^app/(.+).rb$}) { |m| “spec/#{m[1]}_spec.rb” }

watch(%r{^app/controllers/(.+).rb$}) { |m| “spec/integration/#{m[1]}_spec.rb” }

watch(%r{^app/models/(.+).rb$}) { |m| “spec/unit/#{m[1]}_spec.rb” }

end

3

I’ve tried out the complete sample app from https://github.com/mhartl/sample_app_3rd_edition to ensure that I didn’t overlook something.

Now I realize that Guard does respond by automatically executing a test when one of the files it watches changes. Unfortunately, it takes a few MINUTES to respond and doesn’t even provide any visible indication during these minutes. I should note that my normal development environment is in Vagrant.

Why does Guard respond so slowly? Spring is supposed to speed up the testing process, but I have a hard time believing that it’s accomplishing anything.

4

Have you installed the correct inotify bindings or is guard Running in fallback Mode?