Midnight Oil

I’m a big fan of Behavior Driven Development (BDD). It really illustrates how one little change in your code can have significant impact on the rest of you application, which you would never be able to catch without testing. Not to to mention the benefit of being able to write code and make sure it works even if you don’t have production data available.

So, upon completing a clean upgrade to Leopard I noticed that after installing Growl and growlnotify, that growlnotify would not work even through Growl itself was working.

1) First let’s set up the .autotest file. For this you’ll need the gems rspec (1.1.3), ZenTest (3.9.1), and redgreen since ZenTest change how it handled exceptions in 3.9.

sudo gem install rspec sudo gem install ZenTest sudo gem install redgreen

Now open up your ~/.autotest file in Textmate

mate ~/.autotest

Paste in the following code. Notice the exceptions at the bottom of the file that really helps speed up autotests as well as keeps your cpu usage low. My Macbook would get really hot really fast prior to using this execptions.

require 'autotest/redgreen' module Autotest::Growl def self.growl title, msg, img, pri=0, stick="" system "growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img} -p #{pri} -m #{ msg.inspect} #{title} #{stick}" end Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |autotest| filtered = autotest.results.grep(/\d+\s.*examples?/) output = filtered.empty? ? “” : filtered.last.slice(/(\d+)\s.*examples?,\s(\d+)\s.*failures?(?:,\s(\d+)\s.*pending)?/) if output =~ /[1-9]\sfailures?/ growl "Test Results", "#{output}", "~/Library/autotest/rails_fail.png" elsif output =~ /pending/ growl "Test Results", "#{output}", "~/Library/autotest/rails_pending.png" else growl "Test Results", "#{output}", "~/Library/autotest/rails_ok.png" end end end Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |at| %w{.svn .hg .git vendor}.each {|exception| at.add_exception(exception)} end

Next, you’ll want to download the Pass, Fail, and Pending images below:

  

First, the prerequisite to growlnotify is Growl. You can download it from http://growl.info/. It’s a graphical installer, so you shouldn’t have an issues.

Once you’ve installed Growl, pop open the terminal and enter the following commands.

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

Give it a test run:

growlnotify -m "Testing growlnotify" Test

So if that doesn’t work, it’s probably because of an issue with the default permissions and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Here’s what my permssions were. (I have no idea why the @ symbol is there)

cd /usr/local/bin ls -l -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 ryan 501 130288 Jan 22 17:38 growlnotify

To fix the permissions, I ran the following:

sudo chown root:admin growlnotify

Resulting in the following permssions:

cd /usr/local/bin ls -l -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 root admin 130288 Jan 22 17:38 growlnotify

Give it a test run again:

growlnotify -m "Testing growlnotify" Test

Now you can change directories to your rails app and run autotest and growlnotify should be working now..

cd ~/myrailsapp autotest

References:
http://blog.codefront.net/2007/04/01/get-your-testing-results-via-growl-notifications/
http://www.danielfischer.com/2007/05/14/ruby-on-rails-bdd-with-autotest-growl-rspec/
http://railsontherun.com/2008/1/30/misc-tips-and-tricks/

Recently, I noticed that the LoneGM had put together a pretty good review of ObsidianPortal. He focuses on it from a play-by-post perspective, which is not exactly what it’s for, but still gives us a good rating.

Like me, it seems that most of the people using OP can see what it should be, even if it’s not there yet. We’ve all been searching for a good campaign management tool for a long time, and building it up to match that perfect ideal will be a long road.