I’ve been getting up to speed with writing unit tests for Rails applications today. My setup currently consists of RSpec tests being automatically run by autotest when I save a file. This is a really nice workflow as you get instant feedback on failing tests. Couple that with the autotest-growl gem to receive Growl notifications on failure and you’ve got a pretty funky setup.
However, autotest decided it wanted to re-run my tests over and over again, even if I hand’t saved a file in my project. This had me very confused for quite a while until some Googling led me to ‘autotest -v’ which shows you which files had changed. The culprit: test.log.
Excluding log files from autotest
The workaround for this is pretty simple. In your project root directory create a .autotest file. Inside, put
Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |autotest|
%w{.git .svn .hg .DS_Store ._* vendor tmp log doc}.each do |exception|
autotest.add_exception(exception)
end
end
require "autotest/growl"
require "autotest/fsevent"
That little snippet will exclude a bunch of files that you don’t want autotest to care about. The two requires at the bottom are needed for the awesome Growl integration :)
