Fun with Autotest hooks

5 Jun, 2013

I've been doing more tight-feedback-loop unit-testing in Ruby recently, and find myself using autotest (from the ZenTest suite) a lot.

One of the great things about autotest is it's hook mechanism, which allows you to hang behaviour on the passing or failing of a test suite. Many people have written hooks that publish test results via a notification mechanism such as Growl. I wrote a similar one that signals the state of the test-suite via the title of the terminal window running autotest:

def set_title(title)
  if ENV["TERM"] =~ /^xterm/
    puts "\e]0;#{title}\007"
  end
end

Autotest.add_hook(:green) do
  set_title "GREEN - all passed"
end

Autotest.add_hook(:red) do |autotest|
  set_title "RED - #{autotest.files_to_test.size} failure"
end

Also, I have a tendency to checkpoint with "git add" whenever the tests pass. That's easily delegated to autotest:

Autotest.add_hook(:green) do
  checkpoint_command = "git add ."
  puts "AUTOTEST_CHECKPOINT> #{checkpoint_command}"
  system(checkpoint_command)
end

Does anyone have other useful hooks to share?

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