PlugTest¶ ↑

PlugTest is my solution to what was a shockingly difficult time testing my very first gem/plugin: link_block. After rifling through problem after problem trying to use ActionController::TestCase when testing views helpers, I realized that the plugin and helpers worked in the Rails app, so why not just test in there.

Problem is that you can’t really release a plugin without tests, and having tests be dependent on your Rails app is silly.

So here it is: version 1.0 of PlugTest.

I tried to make it as lightweight as possible. I removed the javascript and images, and told Initializer not to load ActiveRecord, ActiveResource, or ActionMailer. The bulk of the code is in PlugTestController and config/initializers/plug_test.rb

$ gem install ryana-plug_test

add the following line to your [PLUGIN_DIR]/test/test_helper.rb (or whatever)

require 'plug_test'

and call the pt_setup method from your TestUnit setup like so:

class MySweetPluginTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  def setup
    pt_setup
  end
end

Bing bang boom.

Whenever you want to test a helper just call:

pt_helper { [CODE YOU WANT TO TEST] }

pt_helper will return the output of the call and setup your @response so you can do:

res = pt_helper { link_to 'my link text', :action => 'test' }
assert_response :success
assert_select 'a', 'my link text'
assert(/my link text/.match(res))

It’s that easy. First crack. It only solves a small need of mine, so fork and pull request away.

Recommend me on Working With Rails or give me a shout out on Twitter @angilly if you think this is awesome.

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