Adding rspec to sinatra

In the previous post I showed how to deploy a sample sinatra app on Cloud Foundry using rake, and now I'm going to add rspec tests to the app.

The first step is to add the rspec gem to your Gemfile and run bundle

source "http://rubygems.org"

gem 'sinatra'

group :test do
  gem 'rspec'
end

Next you need to create the spec directory and add the spec_helper.rb file

require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', 'app.rb')

require 'sinatra'
require 'rack/test'

# setup test environment
set :environment, :test
set :run, false
set :raise_errors, true
set :logging, false

def app
  Sinatra::Application
end

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.include Rack::Test::Methods
end

This is for a classic style sinatra app, if you are using a modular app, you need to make some slight modifications for it to work. I'll show how to do that in a later post.

And finally you are ready to create the spec file that corresponds to the app.rb

require 'spec_helper'

describe "Sinatra App" do

  it "should respond to GET" do
    get '/'
    last_response.should be_ok
    last_response.body.should match(/It works!/)
  end

end

I usually don't use rspec for integration tests, for that I use cucumber. I normally use rspec for unit testing, but since this is a sample app and I don't have any models to test, I included this test for completeness sake. I'll write another blog post how to add cucumber tests to this sample sinatra app later.
To make life easier, I've added a rake task to run the rspec tests

require 'rspec/core/rake_task'

desc "run specs"
RSpec::Core::RakeTask.new

And then I've updated the deployment task to require the rspec task, so we can't update the application unless it passes all tests.

namespace :vmc do
  desc "update cloud foundry deployment"
  task :update => [:bundle, :spec] do
    sh "vmc update #{VMC_APP_NAME}"
  end
end

I've created a github repository for this app to make it easier for you to use it as a template.

My Cloud Foundry development laptop

I've been assembling a new laptop for Cloud Foundry development, and thought I'd document it for my own sake (and also so other can benefit from it).

Hardware

• MacBook Pro
• 2.3 GHz core i7
• 8 GB RAM
  I've thought about bumping it up to 16 GB, but that is another $800
• 15" Anti Glare screen
• 240 GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD
• Optibay which is used instead of the DVD to hold a second hard drive
• 500 GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid HDD 
• 27" Apple ThunderBolt screen
  One at work and one at home - so it can burn some midnight oil using the exact layout as at the office.

I'm not 100% satisfied with the screen, for two reasons:

1. there is a bug that sometimes makes the network connection and USB go bonkers and force me to reboot
2. the screen is very glossy, I prefer matte, but this is not a big issue

Once the price of ThunderBolt disk enclosures drops I'll get one so I can keep my photo archive on it.

It may seem like am an Apple fanboy, but it is not entirely true - I do like their products, but mostly it comes down to "it just works". I've got better things to do than fiddle with kernel updates and trying to get drivers to work...

Software

• Home Brew
  this is how I add most UNIX type tools (like nmap, rbenv, sqlite, watch, git, etc). I've started to use rbenv instead of rvm, as it has no surprising side effects!
• Xcode
  requirement for home brew
• TextMate
  source code editing with some extra bundles for things like git, cucumber, rspec, haml & sass.
• VMware Fusion 4
  for running VMs, e.g. micro cloud foundry
• DiskWave
  finding out what is hogging the disk space
• CrashPlan
  backup solution which lets you backup to your own server as well to "the cloud"
• Growl
  on-screen notifications
• Quicksilver
  shortcuts for starting apps, opening documents
• Remote Desktop Connection
  connecting to remote vCenter servers
• Chicken of the VNC
  another remote desktop program
• Skype
  keeping in touch with my colleagues
• Spotify
  who can write code without music in the background? :-)
• Little Snitch
  because I'm a paranoid git

Apart from that I've got a bunch of other programs, but those are not development related.

Rake file for a sinatra app on Cloud Foundry

My boss is on his money moon, next week is thanks giving, there is no fire to put out and the baby is sleeping - which means I had some time to catch up with my personal todo list today! One thing on it is a simple sinatra app which I wil deploy to Cloud Foundry later.
Exactly what the app is about isn't important, but rather how to get started with it. Note that I'm skipping over all BDD & TDD for now...
Usually I start with something simple like this:

Gemfile

source "http://rubygems.org"

gem 'sinatra'

app.rb

require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
  "It works!"
end

Then I run bundle to grab any missing gems, and then run ruby app.rb to start the app, and finally I verify that it works with curl localhost:4567
If everything turns out ok, I'll deploy the app on Cloud Foundry with:

vmc push -n cf-rake-sinatra
Creating Application: OK
Uploading Application:
  Checking for available resources: OK
  Packing application: OK
  Uploading (1K): OK
Push Status: OK
Staging Application: OK
Starting Application: OK

Now I can verify that this works too, using curl cf-rake-sinatra.cloudfoundry.com. Once this initial deploy is done, I'll run vmc update cf-rake-sinatra each time I change the app. Sometimes I add a new gem dependency, and it has happened more than once that I forget to run bundle, so I've created a Rakefile with two of commonly used tasks:

Rakefile

APP = "cf-rake-sinatra"

$:.unshift(File.dirname(__FILE__))

task :default => [:run]

desc "run app locally"
task :run => "Gemfile.lock" do
  require 'app'
  Sinatra::Application.run!
end

# need to touch Gemfile.lock as bundle doesn't touch the file if there is no change
file "Gemfile.lock" => "Gemfile" do
  sh "bundle && touch Gemfile.lock"
end

namespace :vmc do
  desc "update cloud foundry deployment"
  task :update => "Gemfile.lock" do
    sh "vmc update #{APP}"
  end

  desc "get application status"
  task :status do
    sh "vmc stats #{APP}"
  end
end

This will run bundle any time Gemfile is newer than Gemfile.lock so that we always have up to date gems.
The full list of available rake tasks are:

rake -T
(in /Users/martin/src/ruby/cf-rake-sinatra)
rake run         # run app locally
rake vmc:status  # get application status
rake vmc:update  # update cloud foundry deployment