ruby/spec

ruby/spec

ruby/spec (https://github.com/ruby/spec/) is a test suite for the Ruby language.

Once a month, @eregon merges the in-tree copy under spec/rubyspec with the upstream repository, preserving the commits and history. The same happens for other implementations such as JRuby and TruffleRuby.

Feel welcome to modify the in-tree spec/rubyspec. This is the purpose of the in-tree copy, to facilitate contributions to ruby/spec for MRI developers.

New features, additional tests for existing features and regressions tests are all welcome in ruby/spec. There is very little behavior that is implementation-specific, as in the end user programs tend to rely on every behavior MRI exhibits. In other words: If adding a spec might reveal a bug in another implementation, then it is worth adding it. Currently, the only module which is MRI-specific is RubyVM.

Runing ruby/spec

To run all specs:

make test-rubyspec

Extra arguments can be added via MSPECOPT. For instance, to show the help:

make test-rubyspec MSPECOPT=-h

You can also run the specs in parallel, which is currently experimental. It takes around 10s instead of 60s on a quad-core laptop.

make test-rubyspec MSPECOPT=-j

To run a specific test, add its path to the command:

make test-rubyspec MSPECOPT=spec/rubyspec/language/for_spec.rb

If ruby trunk is your current ruby in $PATH, you can also run mspec directly:

# change ruby to trunk
ruby -v # => trunk
spec/mspec/bin/mspec spec/rubyspec/language/for_spec.rb

ruby/spec and test/

The main difference between a "spec" under spec/rubyspec and a test under test/ is that specs are documenting what they test. This is extremely valuable when reading these tests, as it helps to quickly understand what specific behavior is tested, and how a method should behave. Basic English is fine for spec descriptions. Specs also tend to have few expectations (assertions) per spec, as they specify one aspect of the behavior and not everything at once. Beyond that, the syntax is slightly different but it does the same thing: assert_equal 3, 1+2 is just (1+2).should == 3.

Example:

describe "The for expression" do
  it "iterates over an Enumerable passing each element to the block" do
    j = 0
    for i in 1..3
      j += i
    end
    j.should == 6
  end
end

For more details, see spec/rubyspec/CONTRIBUTING.md.