Gem testing with Rspec

Question

I have written a custom Ruby Gem to hook into our company's authentication and authorization system and am starting to develop the unit tests for the gem.

In our rails app, the Gem can be configured via environment.rb and a custom initializer and yaml file containing the configuration values.

I need to translate the configuration of the Gem in rails to test the standalone Gem. How do I translate this over to Rspec to perform integration testing??

Gem configuration in rails

# environment.rb
MyGem.configure do |config|
  config.url = MY_CONFIG ['url']
  config.application_name = MY_CONFIG ['app_name']
  config.application_id = MY_CONFIG ['app_id']
  config.logger = Rails.logger
  config.log_level = :debug


# Rails config/initalizers/load_config.rb
# Custom config file loading automatically done via initializers
MY_CONFIG = YAML.load_file("#{Rails.root.to_s}/config/my_config.yml")[Rails.env]

# config/my_config.yml
defaults: &defaults
  url: http://url/to/service
  app_name: my app
  app_id: 1

development:
  <<: *defaults

test:
  <<: *defaults

production:
  <<: *defaults

end

I wasn't clear initially. I am trying to test the Gem itself, not the Gem with the rails environment. — Jared Knipp

Maurício Linhares Maurício Linhares · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-28T03:10:17

Here's a simple project where you can see how you'd go by doing it: multiplier

First and foremost, if you're doing the gem management by yourself, please don't, use helper tools like jeweler to do it for you. Install the jeweler gem (gem install jeweler) and once you have it installed, create your gem projet:

jeweler --rspec your_gem_name

With this, it's going to setup a skeleton gem that's going to have a single main file (where you would require your necessary gem files) and the spec folder.

At the spec folder there's spec_helper.rb, that's where our configuration lives, what I did was:

$LOAD_PATH.unshift(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', 'lib'))
$LOAD_PATH.unshift(File.dirname(__FILE__))
require 'rspec'
require 'multiplier'

# Requires supporting files with custom matchers and macros, etc,
# in ./support/ and its subdirectories.
Dir["#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/support/**/*.rb"].each {|f| require f}

RSpec.configure do |config|

end

Multiplier.configure do |config| #these are the only lines I added myself
  config.multiplier 4
end

So, here lives the config for our gem, but you could even do it on each spec, if you'd need it. But if you want to use a single config for all specs this is where you should place it.

Gem testing with Rspec

1 Answers