Strange Symphonies The best way to predict the future is to invent it

autotest-ting your Rails Application with Visual and Audio Feedback using Growl and mpg321

autotest is a commandline tool that comes packaged together with ZenTest. Designed to continually test your Rails application, autotest makes a slight notch easier by removing the need to repeatedly call the rake task to run your application's various tests.

Note: autotest is not limited to the default Ruby Test::Unit::TestCase. It will even work out of the box with RSpec.

Installing autotest

autotest is actually in the ZenTest gem.

sudo gem install -y ZenTest

Go to your application root directory and run autotest and watch it go!

autotest

Dead simple right? But still slightly irritating having to switch back to the terminal to see the results of test. So lets spruce it up a little, lets make it notify us of the results.

Visual Feedback with Growl

Growl is a notification that is over layed on top of your desktop, so that other applications are able to notify/inform you of anything, generally updates. For example Adium uses it to notify you of people logging in or out.

Note: Growl is a Mac OS X application. For other platforms you'll have to look at integration with their notification apps, for example knotify, or gnome-notification.

Combined together with Growl, you will continuously be notified of the current status of your test suite through a nice non disruptive interface. Thus helping to ensure the integrity of your code base.

Installing Growl

Download Growl and install it. But don't eject the Disc Image yet. We have to install the growlnotify command as well. This has to be done via the command line, so pull up your Terminal again.

We need to find out where Growl has been mounted to.

mount | grep -i growl

Possible Result:

/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/Growl 1.1.2 (local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, mounted by aizat)

From here you can see it has been mounted on /Volumes/Growl 1.1.2. Now go back to your Terminal, and we'll install growlnotify.

cd "/Volumes/Growl 1.1.2/"
cd Extras/growlnotify
sudo ./install.sh

By default growlnotify is installed into /usr/local/bin, your applications may not be able to see that this exists. So let's find out.

Execute:

which growlnotify

Desired Result:

/usr/local/bin/growlnotify

Possible Result:

no growlnotify in /opt/local/bin /opt/local/sbin /usr/local/bin /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin

We want the desired result, so what do you do if you don't get it?

echo "export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc

Now growlnotify is accessible by all new Terminal sessions.

Let's give it a shot, and test out Growl!

growlnotify -m "Hey <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_the_Tiger">Tony</a>, isn't this just grrrrrrreat?

Integrating Growl with autotest

We need to create a .autotest (yes with the period) file in your home directory.

touch ~/.autotest
open ~/.autotest

Now stuff this in there!

module Autotest::Growl

  def self.growl title, msg, img, pri=0, sticky=""
    system "growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img.inspect} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title} #{sticky}"
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
    results = [at.results].flatten.join("\n")
    output = results.slice(/(\d+)\s+examples?,\s*(\d+)\s+failures?(,\s*(\d+)\s+not implemented)?/)
    if output
      if $~[2].to_i > 0
        growl "Test Results", "#{output}", File.join(ENV['HOME'], %w[Library Application\ Support autotest rails_fail.png]), 2
      else
        growl "Test Results", "#{output}", File.join(ENV['HOME'], %w[Library Application\ Support autotest rails_ok.png])
      end
    end
  end

end

Note: Adapted from Wincent Knowledge Base. I also took the personal liability to move files to the ~/Library/Application Support/ directory as I thought it would be more appropriate. Your choice, just change as desired.

Now for the final touch, the elusive images!

mkdir -p ~/Library/Application\ Support/autotest
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/autotest
curl -O http://blog.internautdesign.com/files/rails_fail.png
curl -O http://blog.internautdesign.com/files/rails_ok.png

Note: If you want, you can even change the images to whatever you want yourself, just change lines 12 and 14 to point to the image location.

autotest-ing

Now go to the root directory of your Rails application, and simply execute:

autotest

and you should soon be notified of the results of your test.

Note: You can further customize Growl in the System Preferences!

Audio Feedback

Visual feedback is cool, but it would be even more awesome if it had audio feedback to accompany it.

Note: This method is cross platform.

This was first described on FozWorks (read on how to Install)

As I aggregated my autotest images into the ~/Library/Application Support/autotest directory, I thought I'd dump the sound files in there as well. Just pay attention when you have to modify your ~/.autotest to accommodate the different path.

The only disappointment with the default sounds they provide is that, they are a little bit soft, and is often drowned out by my music player. But no worries, you can decide to use your own effects, or if your like me, increase the gain with Audacity.

In the mean time, anyone have some interesting replacement sound effects?