Faster Specs without Loading Rails

If you’re writing unit specs in a Rails project and you don’t need Rails and all of its machinery to load in your spec while you’re iterating (for instance, because Rails takes 15+ seconds to load), you can just require the class you’re concerned with.

#require 'spec_helper'
require 'rubygems'
require 'active_support/all'
require File.join(*[File.dirname(__FILE__)] + %w[.. lib services mything])

I use this when I’m writing specs for an isolated service object or adapter class, for instance, and I need to re-run the specs constantly. When I’m done I can just remove the 3 extra requires and go back to requiring spec_helper.

It’s not a long-term fix or anything—just a quick hack to get specs running faster when you’re iterating quickly on an isolated piece of code.

11 Notes/ Hide

  1. iampedantic posted this