Installing GrowlNotify and Autotest for BDD use with Rspec on Leopard

Ruby on Rails 12 Comments »

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.

Now open up your ~/.autotest file in Textmate

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.

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

rails_ok.png rails_pending.png rails_fail.png

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.

Give it a test run:

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)

To fix the permissions, I ran the following:

Resulting in the following permssions:

Give it a test run again:

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

Growlnotify Green

Growlnofity Red

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/


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The LoneGM reviews ObsidianPortal

Uncategorized No Comments »

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.


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