In an effort to continue my contributions to the open source Ruby/Rails ecosystem, I decided to help the factory_girl_rails team move the Rails3 generators from the rails3-generators project into the factory_girl_rails project.
Like all good Ruby/Rails developers, they asked to make sure that I had tests written around the generators. I thought for a bit on how I was going to do this and then I wandered across the Cucumber feature files in the rspec-rails repo and found my answer.
Rspec-rails (and RSpec2 as well) uses a gem called Aruba to easily write Cucumber features around things that happen from the command line.
If you'd like to check out the result of using Cucumber and Aruba to test Rails3 generators, head over to my fork of the factory_girl_rails gem and check out the features/generators.feature file.
Hopefully the changes will be merged into the official factory_girl_rails repo soon and the generators will live closer to home.
Nice post Mike, I haven't seen many people talking about aruba just yet, and I think it's an excellent lib that makes testing command line and file system features much easier.
I've begun using it on a new idea of mine, code over at github of course: http://github.com/jackdempsey/writeme
Hopefully this can give some further examples on ways to do things. I know I had to bug Aslak on the cucumber list to get a few things straight in my mind.
Awesome, I love testing generators with cucumber! I have to port some of my generators to rails 3, I'll check your repo to study more about the rails 3 generators :)
Andrea, thanks for the comment and the inspiration. I got the idea of testing the generators with Cucumber from your blog.
Cool! and now I'll take inspiration from your work on rails 3 ;)