Net::LDAP for Ruby (also called net-ldap) implements client access for the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), an IETF standard protocol for accessing distributed directory services. Net::LDAP is written completely in Ruby with no external dependencies. It supports most LDAP client features and a subset of server features as well. Net::LDAP has been tested against modern popular LDAP servers including OpenLDAP and Active Directory. The current release is mostly compliant with earlier versions of the IETF LDAP RFCs (2251-2256, 2829-2830, 3377, and 3771). Our roadmap for Net::LDAP 1.0 is to gain full <em>client</em> compliance with the most recent LDAP RFCs (4510-4519, plutions of 4520-4532).

Auth0 is an authentication broker that supports social identity providers as well as enterprise identity providers such as Active Directory, LDAP, Google Apps, Salesforce. OmniAuth is a library that standardizes multi-provider authentication for web applications. It was created to be powerful, flexible, and do as little as possible. omniauth-auth0 is the OmniAuth strategy for Auth0.

An Windows Azure Active Directory OAuth2 strategy for OmniAuth

Rails wrapper for RubyEventStore with batteries included. Ships with asynchronous after-commit event dispatch on top of ActiveJob, ActiveSupport::Notifications instrumentation enabled, request metadata enrichment and opinionated directory structure generator for bounded contexts.

Microsoft Azure Active Directory Graph Rbac Client Library for Ruby

It provides the interface to some LDAP libraries (e.g. OpenLDAP, Netscape SDK and Active Directory). The common API for application development is described in RFC1823 and is supported by Ruby/LDAP.

Windows Azure Active Directory authentication client library

OmniAuth WS-Federation strategy enabling integration with Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS), Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) 2.0, custom Identity Providers built with Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) or any other Identity Provider supporting the WS-Federation protocol.

ActiveDirectory uses Net::LDAP to provide a means of accessing and modifying an Active Directory data store. This is a fork of the activedirectory gem.

A full featured library for working with Microsofts Active Directory in Ruby.

Devise based AD User Logins

A ruby gem for using omniauth to authenticate Azure Active Directory users

ldap/active directory instructions for Lita

Finder is a general purpose file finder for Ruby. Finder can search RubyGems, Roll libraries and Ruby's standard $LOAD_PATH and system data directory for the active or the most current library files. It is especially useful for implementing library-based plugin systems.

Using ActiveLdap, this library provides an easy interface for communicating with the Cornell University LDAP directory. Use of this directory is restricted to purposes authorized by the university.

Active Directory authentication module for Devise, based off of LDAP Authentication

ActiveDirectory uses Net::LDAP to provide a means of accessing and modifying an Active Directory data store.

Net::LDAP for Ruby (also called net-ldap) implements client access for the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), an IETF standard protocol for accessing distributed directory services. Net::LDAP is written completely in Ruby with no external dependencies. It supports most LDAP client features and a subset of server features as well. Net::LDAP has been tested against modern popular LDAP servers including OpenLDAP and Active Directory. The current release is mostly compliant with earlier versions of the IETF LDAP RFCs (2251–2256, 2829–2830, 3377, and 3771). Our roadmap for Net::LDAP 1.0 is to gain full <em>client</em> compliance with the most recent LDAP RFCs (4510–4519, plutions of 4520–4532).

Lookout Lookout is a unit testing framework for Ruby¹ that puts your results in focus. Tests (expectations) are written as follows expect 2 do 1 + 1 end expect ArgumentError do Integer('1 + 1') end expect Array do [1, 2, 3].select{ |i| i % 2 == 0 } end expect [2, 4, 6] do [1, 2, 3].map{ |i| i * 2 } end Lookout is designed to encourage – force, even – unit testing best practices such as • Setting up only one expectation per test • Not setting expectations on non-public APIs • Test isolation This is done by • Only allowing one expectation to be set per test • Providing no (additional) way of accessing private state • Providing no setup and tear-down methods, nor a method of providing test helpers Other important points are • Putting the expected outcome of a test in focus with the steps of the calculation of the actual result only as a secondary concern • A focus on code readability by providing no mechanism for describing an expectation other than the code in the expectation itself • A unified syntax for setting up both state-based and behavior-based expectations The way Lookout works has been heavily influenced by expectations², by {Jay Fields}³. The code base was once also heavily based on expectations, based at Subversion {revision 76}⁴. A lot has happened since then and all of the work past that revision are due to {Nikolai Weibull}⁵. ¹ Ruby: http://ruby-lang.org/ ² Expectations: http://expectations.rubyforge.org/ ³ Jay Fields’s blog: http://blog.jayfields.com/ ⁴ Lookout revision 76: https://github.com/now/lookout/commit/537bedf3e5b3eb4b31c066b3266f42964ac35ebe ⁵ Nikolai Weibull’s home page: http://disu.se/ § Installation Install Lookout with % gem install lookout § Usage Lookout allows you to set expectations on an object’s state or behavior. We’ll begin by looking at state expectations and then take a look at expectations on behavior. § Expectations on State: Literals An expectation can be made on the result of a computation: expect 2 do 1 + 1 end Most objects, in fact, have their state expectations checked by invoking ‹#==› on the expected value with the result as its argument. Checking that a result is within a given range is also simple: expect 0.099..0.101 do 0.4 - 0.3 end Here, the more general ‹#===› is being used on the ‹Range›. § Regexps ‹Strings› of course match against ‹Strings›: expect 'ab' do 'abc'[0..1] end but we can also match a ‹String› against a ‹Regexp›: expect %r{a substring} do 'a string with a substring' end (Note the use of ‹%r{…}› to avoid warnings that will be generated when Ruby parses ‹expect /…/›.) § Modules Checking that the result includes a certain module is done by expecting the ‹Module›. expect Enumerable do [] end This, due to the nature of Ruby, of course also works for classes (as they are also modules): expect String do 'a string' end This doesn’t hinder us from expecting the actual ‹Module› itself: expect Enumerable do Enumerable end or the ‹Class›: expect String do String end for obvious reasons. As you may have figured out yourself, this is accomplished by first trying ‹#==› and, if it returns ‹false›, then trying ‹#===› on the expected ‹Module›. This is also true of ‹Ranges› and ‹Regexps›. § Booleans Truthfulness is expected with ‹true› and ‹false›: expect true do 1 end expect false do nil end Results equaling ‹true› or ‹false› are slightly different: expect TrueClass do true end expect FalseClass do false end The rationale for this is that you should only care if the result of a computation evaluates to a value that Ruby considers to be either true or false, not the exact literals ‹true› or ‹false›. § IO Expecting output on an IO object is also common: expect output("abc\ndef\n") do |io| io.puts 'abc', 'def' end This can be used to capture the output of a formatter that takes an output object as a parameter. § Warnings Expecting warnings from code isn’t very common, but should be done: expect warning('this is your final one!') do warn 'this is your final one!' end expect warning('this is your final one!') do warn '%s:%d: warning: this is your final one!' % [__FILE__, __LINE__] end ‹$VERBOSE› is set to ‹true› during the execution of the block, so you don’t need to do so yourself. If you have other code that depends on the value of $VERBOSE, that can be done with ‹#with_verbose› expect nil do with_verbose nil do $VERBOSE end end § Errors You should always be expecting errors from – and in, but that’s a different story – your code: expect ArgumentError do Integer('1 + 1') end Often, not only the type of the error, but its description, is important to check: expect StandardError.new('message') do raise StandardError.new('message') end As with ‹Strings›, ‹Regexps› can be used to check the error description: expect StandardError.new(/mess/) do raise StandardError.new('message') end § Queries Through Symbols Symbols are generally matched against symbols, but as a special case, symbols ending with ‹?› are seen as expectations on the result of query methods on the result of the block, given that the method is of zero arity and that the result isn’t a Symbol itself. Simply expect a symbol ending with ‹?›: expect :empty? do [] end To expect it’s negation, expect the same symbol beginning with ‹not_›: expect :not_nil? do [1, 2, 3] end This is the same as expect true do [].empty? end and expect false do [1, 2, 3].empty? end but provides much clearer failure messages. It also makes the expectation’s intent a lot clearer. § Queries By Proxy There’s also a way to make the expectations of query methods explicit by invoking methods on the result of the block. For example, to check that the even elements of the Array ‹[1, 2, 3]› include ‹1› you could write expect result.to.include? 1 do [1, 2, 3].reject{ |e| e.even? } end You could likewise check that the result doesn’t include 2: expect result.not.to.include? 2 do [1, 2, 3].reject{ |e| e.even? } end This is the same as (and executes a little bit slower than) writing expect false do [1, 2, 3].reject{ |e| e.even? }.include? 2 end but provides much clearer failure messages. Given that these two last examples would fail, you’d get a message saying “[1, 2, 3]#include?(2)” instead of the terser “true≠false”. It also clearly separates the actual expectation from the set-up. The keyword for this kind of expectations is ‹result›. This may be followed by any of the methods • ‹#not› • ‹#to› • ‹#be› • ‹#have› or any other method you will want to call on the result. The methods ‹#to›, ‹#be›, and ‹#have› do nothing except improve readability. The ‹#not› method inverts the expectation. § Literal Literals If you need to literally check against any of the types of objects otherwise treated specially, that is, any instances of • ‹Module› • ‹Range› • ‹Regexp› • ‹Exception› • ‹Symbol›, given that it ends with ‹?› you can do so by wrapping it in ‹literal(…)›: expect literal(:empty?) do :empty? end You almost never need to do this, as, for all but symbols, instances will match accordingly as well. § Expectations on Behavior We expect our objects to be on their best behavior. Lookout allows you to make sure that they are. Reception expectations let us verify that a method is called in the way that we expect it to be: expect mock.to.receive.to_str(without_arguments){ '123' } do |o| o.to_str end Here, ‹#mock› creates a mock object, an object that doesn’t respond to anything unless you tell it to. We tell it to expect to receive a call to ‹#to_str› without arguments and have ‹#to_str› return ‹'123'› when called. The mock object is then passed in to the block so that the expectations placed upon it can be fulfilled. Sometimes we only want to make sure that a method is called in the way that we expect it to be, but we don’t care if any other methods are called on the object. A stub object, created with ‹#stub›, expects any method and returns a stub object that, again, expects any method, and thus fits the bill. expect stub.to.receive.to_str(without_arguments){ '123' } do |o| o.to_str if o.convertable? end You don’t have to use a mock object to verify that a method is called: expect Object.to.receive.name do Object.name end As you have figured out by now, the expected method call is set up by calling ‹#receive› after ‹#to›. ‹#Receive› is followed by a call to the method to expect with any expected arguments. The body of the expected method can be given as the block to the method. Finally, an expected invocation count may follow the method. Let’s look at this formal specification in more detail. The expected method arguments may be given in a variety of ways. Let’s introduce them by giving some examples: expect mock.to.receive.a do |m| m.a end Here, the method ‹#a› must be called with any number of arguments. It may be called any number of times, but it must be called at least once. If a method must receive exactly one argument, you can use ‹Object›, as the same matching rules apply for arguments as they do for state expectations: expect mock.to.receive.a(Object) do |m| m.a 0 end If a method must receive a specific argument, you can use that argument: expect mock.to.receive.a(1..2) do |m| m.a 1 end Again, the same matching rules apply for arguments as they do for state expectations, so the previous example expects a call to ‹#a› with 1, 2, or the Range 1..2 as an argument on ‹m›. If a method must be invoked without any arguments you can use ‹without_arguments›: expect mock.to.receive.a(without_arguments) do |m| m.a end You can of course use both ‹Object› and actual arguments: expect mock.to.receive.a(Object, 2, Object) do |m| m.a nil, 2, '3' end The body of the expected method may be given as the block. Here, calling ‹#a› on ‹m› will give the result ‹1›: expect mock.to.receive.a{ 1 } do |m| raise 'not 1' unless m.a == 1 end If no body has been given, the result will be a stub object. To take a block, grab a block parameter and ‹#call› it: expect mock.to.receive.a{ |&b| b.call(1) } do |m| j = 0 m.a{ |i| j = i } raise 'not 1' unless j == 1 end To simulate an ‹#each›-like method, ‹#call› the block several times. Invocation count expectations can be set if the default expectation of “at least once” isn’t good enough. The following expectations are possible • ‹#at_most_once› • ‹#once› • ‹#at_least_once› • ‹#twice› And, for a given ‹N›, • ‹#at_most(N)› • ‹#exactly(N)› • ‹#at_least(N)› § Utilities: Stubs Method stubs are another useful thing to have in a unit testing framework. Sometimes you need to override a method that does something a test shouldn’t do, like access and alter bank accounts. We can override – stub out – a method by using the ‹#stub› method. Let’s assume that we have an ‹Account› class that has two methods, ‹#slips› and ‹#total›. ‹#Slips› retrieves the bank slips that keep track of your deposits to the ‹Account› from a database. ‹#Total› sums the ‹#slips›. In the following test we want to make sure that ‹#total› does what it should do without accessing the database. We therefore stub out ‹#slips› and make it return something that we can easily control. expect 6 do |m| stub(Class.new{ def slips raise 'database not available' end def total slips.reduce(0){ |m, n| m.to_i + n.to_i } end }.new, :slips => [1, 2, 3]){ |account| account.total } end To make it easy to create objects with a set of stubbed methods there’s also a convenience method: expect 3 do s = stub(:a => 1, :b => 2) s.a + s.b end This short-hand notation can also be used for the expected value: expect stub(:a => 1, :b => 2).to.receive.a do |o| o.a + o.b end and also works for mock objects: expect mock(:a => 2, :b => 2).to.receive.a do |o| o.a + o.b end Blocks are also allowed when defining stub methods: expect 3 do s = stub(:a => proc{ |a, b| a + b }) s.a(1, 2) end If need be, we can stub out a specific method on an object: expect 'def' do stub('abc', :to_str => 'def'){ |a| a.to_str } end The stub is active during the execution of the block. § Overriding Constants Sometimes you need to override the value of a constant during the execution of some code. Use ‹#with_const› to do just that: expect 'hello' do with_const 'A::B::C', 'hello' do A::B::C end end Here, the constant ‹A::B::C› is set to ‹'hello'› during the execution of the block. None of the constants ‹A›, ‹B›, and ‹C› need to exist for this to work. If a constant doesn’t exist it’s created and set to a new, empty, ‹Module›. The value of ‹A::B::C›, if any, is restored after the block returns and any constants that didn’t previously exist are removed. § Overriding Environment Variables Another thing you often need to control in your tests is the value of environment variables. Depending on such global values is, of course, not a good practice, but is often unavoidable when working with external libraries. ‹#With_env› allows you to override the value of environment variables during the execution of a block by giving it a ‹Hash› of key/value pairs where the key is the name of the environment variable and the value is the value that it should have during the execution of that block: expect 'hello' do with_env 'INTRO' => 'hello' do ENV['INTRO'] end end Any overridden values are restored and any keys that weren’t previously a part of the environment are removed when the block returns. § Overriding Globals You may also want to override the value of a global temporarily: expect 'hello' do with_global :$stdout, StringIO.new do print 'hello' $stdout.string end end You thus provide the name of the global and a value that it should take during the execution of a block of code. The block gets passed the overridden value, should you need it: expect true do with_global :$stdout, StringIO.new do |overridden| $stdout != overridden end end § Integration Lookout can be used from Rake¹. Simply install Lookout-Rake²: % gem install lookout-rake and add the following code to your Rakefile require 'lookout-rake-3.0' Lookout::Rake::Tasks::Test.new Make sure to read up on using Lookout-Rake for further benefits and customization. ¹ Read more about Rake at http://rake.rubyforge.org/ ² Get information on Lookout-Rake at http://disu.se/software/lookout-rake/ § API Lookout comes with an API¹ that let’s you create things such as new expected values, difference reports for your types, and so on. ¹ See http://disu.se/software/lookout/api/ § Interface Design The default output of Lookout can Spartanly be described as Spartan. If no errors or failures occur, no output is generated. This is unconventional, as unit testing frameworks tend to dump a lot of information on the user, concerning things such as progress, test count summaries, and flamboyantly colored text telling you that your tests passed. None of this output is needed. Your tests should run fast enough to not require progress reports. The lack of output provides you with the same amount of information as reporting success. Test count summaries are only useful if you’re worried that your tests aren’t being run, but if you worry about that, then providing such output doesn’t really help. Testing your tests requires something beyond reporting some arbitrary count that you would have to verify by hand anyway. When errors or failures do occur, however, the relevant information is output in a format that can easily be parsed by an ‹'errorformat'› for Vim or with {Compilation Mode}¹ for Emacs². Diffs are generated for Strings, Arrays, Hashes, and I/O. ¹ Read up on Compilation mode for Emacs at http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CompilationMode ² Visit The GNU Foundation’s Emacs’ software page at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ § External Design Let’s now look at some of the points made in the introduction in greater detail. Lookout only allows you to set one expectation per test. If you’re testing behavior with a reception expectation, then only one method-invocation expectation can be set. If you’re testing state, then only one result can be verified. It may seem like this would cause unnecessary duplication between tests. While this is certainly a possibility, when you actually begin to try to avoid such duplication you find that you often do so by improving your interfaces. This kind of restriction tends to encourage the use of value objects, which are easy to test, and more focused objects, which require simpler tests, as they have less behavior to test, per method. By keeping your interfaces focused you’re also keeping your tests focused. Keeping your tests focused improves, in itself, test isolation, but let’s look at something that hinders it: setup and tear-down methods. Most unit testing frameworks encourage test fragmentation by providing setup and tear-down methods. Setup methods create objects and, perhaps, just their behavior for a set of tests. This means that you have to look in two places to figure out what’s being done in a test. This may work fine for few methods with simple set-ups, but makes things complicated when the number of tests increases and the set-up is complex. Often, each test further adjusts the previously set-up object before performing any verifications, further complicating the process of figuring out what state an object has in a given test. Tear-down methods clean up after tests, perhaps by removing records from a database or deleting files from the file-system. The duplication that setup methods and tear-down methods hope to remove is better avoided by improving your interfaces. This can be done by providing better set-up methods for your objects and using idioms such as {Resource Acquisition Is Initialization}¹ for guaranteed clean-up, test or no test. By not using setup and tear-down methods we keep everything pertinent to a test in the test itself, thus improving test isolation. (You also won’t {slow down your tests}² by keeping unnecessary state.) Most unit test frameworks also allow you to create arbitrary test helper methods. Lookout doesn’t. The same rationale as that that has been crystallized in the preceding paragraphs applies. If you need helpers you’re interface isn’t good enough. It really is as simple as that. To clarify: there’s nothing inherently wrong with test helper methods, but they should be general enough that they reside in their own library. The support for mocks in Lookout is provided through a set of test helper methods that make it easier to create mocks than it would have been without them. Lookout-rack³ is another example of a library providing test helper methods (well, one method, actually) that are very useful in testing web applications that use Rack⁴. A final point at which some unit test frameworks try to fragment tests further is documentation. These frameworks provide ways of describing the whats and hows of what’s being tested, the rationale being that this will provide documentation of both the test and the code being tested. Describing how a stack data structure is meant to work is a common example. A stack is, however, a rather simple data structure, so such a description provides little, if any, additional information that can’t be extracted from the implementation and its tests themselves. The implementation and its tests is, in fact, its own best documentation. Taking the points made in the previous paragraphs into account, we should already have simple, self-describing, interfaces that have easily understood tests associated with them. Rationales for the use of a given data structure or system-design design documentation is better suited in separate documentation focused at describing exactly those issues. ¹ Read the Wikipedia entry for Resource Acquisition Is Initialization at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initialization ² Read how 37signals had problems with slow Test::Unit tests at http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2742-the-road-to-faster-tests/ ³ Visit the Lookout-rack home page at http://disu.se/software/lookout-rack/ ⁴ Visit the Rack Rubyforge project page at http://rack.rubyforge.org/ § Internal Design The internal design of Lookout has had a couple of goals. • As few external dependencies as possible • As few internal dependencies as possible • Internal extensibility provides external extensibility • As fast load times as possible • As high a ratio of value objects to mutable objects as possible • Each object must have a simple, obvious name • Use mix-ins, not inheritance for shared behavior • As few responsibilities per object as possible • Optimizing for speed can only be done when you have all the facts § External Dependencies Lookout used to depend on Mocha for mocks and stubs. While benchmarking I noticed that a method in Mocha was taking up more than 300 percent of the runtime. It turned out that Mocha’s method for cleaning up back-traces generated when a mock failed was doing something incredibly stupid: backtrace.reject{ |l| Regexp.new(@lib).match(File.expand_path(l)) } Here ‹@lib› is a ‹String› containing the path to the lib sub-directory in the Mocha installation directory. I reported it, provided a patch five days later, then waited. Nothing happened. {254 days later}¹, according to {Wolfram Alpha}², half of my patch was, apparently – I say “apparently”, as I received no notification – applied. By that time I had replaced the whole mocking-and-stubbing subsystem and dropped the dependency. Many Ruby developers claim that Ruby and its gems are too fast-moving for normal package-managing systems to keep up. This is testament to the fact that this isn’t the case and that the real problem is instead related to sloppy practices. Please note that I don’t want to single out the Mocha library nor its developers. I only want to provide an example where relying on external dependencies can be “considered harmful”. ¹ See the Wolfram Alpha calculation at http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=days+between+march+17%2C+2010+and+november+26%2C+2010 ² Check out the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine at http://www.wolframalpha.com/ § Internal Dependencies Lookout has been designed so as to keep each subsystem independent of any other. The diff subsystem is, for example, completely decoupled from any other part of the system as a whole and could be moved into its own library at a time where that would be of interest to anyone. What’s perhaps more interesting is that the diff subsystem is itself very modular. The data passes through a set of filters that depends on what kind of diff has been requested, each filter yielding modified data as it receives it. If you want to read some rather functional Ruby I can highly recommend looking at the code in the ‹lib/lookout/diff› directory. This lookout on the design of the library also makes it easy to extend Lookout. Lookout-rack was, for example, written in about four hours and about 5 of those 240 minutes were spent on setting up the interface between the two. § Optimizing For Speed The following paragraph is perhaps a bit personal, but might be interesting nonetheless. I’ve always worried about speed. The original Expectations library used ‹extend› a lot to add new behavior to objects. Expectations, for example, used to hold the result of their execution (what we now term “evaluation”) by being extended by a module representing success, failure, or error. For the longest time I used this same method, worrying about the increased performance cost that creating new objects for results would incur. I finally came to a point where I felt that the code was so simple and clean that rewriting this part of the code for a benchmark wouldn’t take more than perhaps ten minutes. Well, ten minutes later I had my results and they confirmed that creating new objects wasn’t harming performance. I was very pleased. § Naming I hate low lines (underscores). I try to avoid them in method names and I always avoid them in file names. Since the current “best practice” in the Ruby community is to put ‹BeginEndStorage› in a file called ‹begin_end_storage.rb›, I only name constants using a single noun. This has had the added benefit that classes seem to have acquired less behavior, as using a single noun doesn’t allow you to tack on additional behavior without questioning if it’s really appropriate to do so, given the rather limited range of interpretation for that noun. It also seems to encourage the creation of value objects, as something named ‹Range› feels a lot more like a value than ‹BeginEndStorage›. (To reach object-oriented-programming Nirvana you must achieve complete value.) § News § 3.0.0 The ‹xml› expectation has been dropped. It wasn’t documented, didn’t suit very many use cases, and can be better implemented by an external library. The ‹arg› argument matcher for mock method arguments has been removed, as it didn’t provide any benefit over using Object. The ‹#yield› and ‹#each› methods on stub and mock methods have been removed. They were slightly weird and their use case can be implemented using block parameters instead. The ‹stub› method inside ‹expect› blocks now stubs out the methods during the execution of a provided block instead of during the execution of the whole except block. When a mock method is called too many times, this is reported immediately, with a full backtrace. This makes it easier to pin down what’s wrong with the code. Query expectations were added. Explicit query expectations were added. Fluent boolean expectations, for example, ‹expect nil.to.be.nil?› have been replaced by query expectations (‹expect :nil? do nil end›) and explicit query expectations (‹expect result.to.be.nil? do nil end›). This was done to discourage creating objects as the expected value and creating objects that change during the course of the test. The ‹literal› expectation was added. Equality (‹#==›) is now checked before “caseity” (‹#===›) for modules, ranges, and regular expressions to match the documentation. § Financing Currently, most of my time is spent at my day job and in my rather busy private life. Please motivate me to spend time on this piece of software by donating some of your money to this project. Yeah, I realize that requesting money to develop software is a bit, well, capitalistic of me. But please realize that I live in a capitalistic society and I need money to have other people give me the things that I need to continue living under the rules of said society. So, if you feel that this piece of software has helped you out enough to warrant a reward, please PayPal a donation to now@disu.se¹. Thanks! Your support won’t go unnoticed! ¹ Send a donation: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations&business=now%40disu%2ese&item_name=Lookout § Reporting Bugs Please report any bugs that you encounter to the {issue tracker}¹. ¹ See https://github.com/now/lookout/issues § Contributors Contributors to the original expectations codebase are mentioned there. We hope no one on that list feels left out of this list. Please {let us know}¹ if you do. • Nikolai Weibull ¹ Add an issue to the Lookout issue tracker at https://github.com/now/lookout/issues § Licensing Lookout is free software: you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the {GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3}¹ or later², as published by the {Free Software Foundation}³. ¹ See http://disu.se/licenses/lgpl-3.0/ ² See http://gnu.org/licenses/ ³ See http://fsf.org/

= Simple task organizer syctask can be used to create, plan, prioritize and schedule tasks. ==Install The application can be installed with $ gem install syc-task == Usage syctask provides basic task organizer functions as create, update, list and complete a task. Additional functions are to plan tasks you want to accomplish today. If you are not sure in which sequence to conduct the task you can prioritize them with a pair wise comparisson. You can time tasks with start and stop and you can finally extract tasks from a minutes of meetings file. The schedule task command will print a graphical timeline of the working day assigning the planned tasks to the timeline. Busy times are marked red. Meetings are listed with associated tasks that are assigned to the meetings. With the statistics command you can print statistical evaluation of tasks duration and count. ===Create tasks with new Create a new task in the default task directory ~/.tasks $ syctask new "My first task" Provide a description $ syctask new "My first task" --description "Explanation of my first task" Schedule a task with a follow-up and due date $ syctask new "My first task" --follow-up "2013-02-25" --due "2013-03-11" Set a proirity for a task $ syctask new "My first task" --prio 3 Prompt for task input $ syctask new will prompt for task titles. Ctrl-D will end input. Except for --description you can also provide short forms for the options. ===Create tasks by scanning from files When writing minutes of meetings tasks that should be followed up in syctask can be annotated so they will be recognized by the scan command. The following structure shows how to annotade tasks Some text before @task; title;description;follow_up;due_date,prio Schedule meeting;Invite all developers;2016-09-12;2016-10-12;1 Write letter;Practice writing letters;;;3 Some text after The above annotation will only scan the next task because of the singular 'task' where the task values are separated with ';'. The line after the annotation '@task' lists the sequence of the fields of the task. It is also possible to list the tasks in a table, e.g. markdown Some text before @tasks| title |description |follow_up |due_date |prio ----------------|--------------------------|----------|----------|---- Schedule meeting|Invite all developers |2016-09-12|2016-10-12|1 Write letter |Practice writing letters | | |3 Some text after Call partner |Ask for project's progress|2016-09-14| |1 Even more text The example above scans all tasks due to the plural 'tasks'. It also scans all tasks that are separated with non-task text and occur after the annotation and confirm to the field structure. Lines that start with '-' will be ignored. So if you want to skip only a few tasks within a task list prepend them with '-'. If you have tasks with different fields then you have to add another annotation with the new field structure. Possible fields are title - the title of the task - mandatory field! description - the description of the task follow_up - the follow-up date of the task in the form yyyy-mm-dd due_date - the due-date of the task in the form yyyy-mm-dd prio - the priority of the task tags - tags the task is annotated with note - a note for the task Note: follow_up and due_date can also be written as Follow-up and Due-Date. Also case is ignored. As inidcated in the list the title column is mandatory. Without the title column scan will raise an error during a scan. Fields that are not part of the above list will be ignored. # | Title | Who - | ------------------------------------ | --- 1 | Schedule meeting with all developers | Me 2 | Write letter to practice writing | You In the table only the column Title will be scanned. The '#' and 'Who' column will be ignored during scan. This table is also a table for a minimum scan structure. You need at least to provide a title column so the scan function will recognize the table as a task list. Scanning tasks from files $ syctask scan 2016-09-10-mom.md 2016-09-09-mom.md ===Plan tasks The plan command will print tasks and prompts whether to (a)dd or (s)kip the task. If (q)uit is selected the tasks already added will be add to the today's task list. If (c)omplete is selected the complete task will be printed and the user will be prompted again for adding the task. Invoke plan without filter $ syctask plan 1 - My first task (a)dd, (c)omplete, (s)kip, (q)uit? a Duration (1 = 15 minutes, return 30 minutes): 3 --&gt; 1 task(s) planned Invoke plan with a filter $ syctask plan --id "1,3,5,8" 1 - My first task (a)dd, (c)omplete, (s)kip, (q)uit? Move tasks to another days plan $ syctask plan today --move tomorrow --id 3,5 This will move the tasks with ID 3 and 5 from the today's plan to the tomorrow's plan. The duration will be set to the remaining processing time but at least to 30 minutes. ===Prioritize tasks Planned tasks can be prioritized in a pair wise comparisson. So each task is compared to all other tasks. The task with the highest priority will bubble on top followed by the task with the next highest priority and so on. $ syctask prio 1: My first task 2: My second task Task 1 has (h)igher or (l)ower priority, or (q)uit: h 1: My first task 2: My third task Task 1 has (h)igher or (l)ower priority, or (q)uit: l 1: My third task 2: My fourth task Task 1 has (h)igher or (l)ower priority, or (q)uit: h ... syctask schedule will then print tasks as follows Tasks ----- 0: 10 - My fourth task 1: 7 - My third task 2: 3 - My first task 3: 9 - My second task ... Instead of conducting pairwise comparisson the order of the tasks in the plan can be specified with the -o flag $ syctask plan -o 7,3,10,9 The plan or schedule command will print the tasks in the specified order Tasks ----- 0: 7 - My third task 1: 3 - My first task 2: 10 - My fourth task 3: 9 - My second task If only a part of the tasks is provided the rest of the tasks is appended to the end of the task plan. If you specify a position flag the prioritized tasks are added at the provided position. $ syctask plan -o 7,9 -p 2 Tasks ----- 0: 3 - My first task 1: 10 - My fourth task 2: 7 - My third task 3: 9 - My second task ===Create schedule The schedule command will print a graphical schedule with assigning the tasks selected with plan. When schedule command is invoked the planned tasks are added at or after the current time within the time schedule. Tasks that are done and scheduled in the future are not shown. Tasks done and in the past are shown with the actual processing time. Create a schedule with working time from 8a.m. to 6p.m. and meetings between 9a.m. and 9.30a.m. and 1p.m. and 2.45p.m. $ syctask schedule -w "8:00-18:00" -b "9:00-9:30,13:00-14:45" Add titles to the meetings $ syctask schedule -m "Project status,Management meeting" The output will be Meetings -------- A - Project status B - Management meeting A B xxx-///-|---|---|---///////-|---|---|---| 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 1 Tasks ----- 0 - 1: My first task Adding a task to a meeting $ syctask schedule -a "A:0" will print Meetings -------- A - Project status 1 - My first task B - Management meeting A B ----///-|---|---|---///////-|---|---|---| 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Tasks ----- 0: 1 - My first task A task that is re-scheduled with $ syctask update 1 -f tomorrow will be shown as done (green) in the schedule and instead of separator - it shows ~. Tasks ---- 0: 1 ~ My first task A started task will be indicated by * $ syctask start 1 $ syctask sche Tasks ----- 0: 1 * My first task ===List tasks List tasks that are not marked as done in short form $ syctask list List all tasks in long form $ syctask list --all --complete Search tasks that match a pattern $ syctask list --id "&lt;10" --follow_up "&gt;2013-02-25" --title "My \w task" ===Inspect tasks Lists each unplanned task and allows to edit, delete, mark as done or plan for today or another day $ syctask inspect 0016 Create command for inspection (e)dit, (d)one, de(l)ete, (p)lan, da(t)e, (c)omplete, (s)kip, (b)ack, (q)uit ===Edit task Edit a task with ID 10 in vi $ syctask edit 10 ===Update tasks Except for title and id all values can be updated. Note and tags are not overridden rather supplemented with the update value. Update task with ID 1 and provide some informative note $ syctask update 1 --note "Some explanation about the progress on the task" ===Complete tasks Complete the task with ID 1 and provide a final note $ syctask done 1 --note "Finalize my first task" ===Delete tasks Delete tasks with ID 1,3 and 5 from the default task directory $ syctask delete --id 1,3,5 Delete tasks with ID 8 and 12 from the planned tasks of today. The tasks are only removed from the planned tasks and not physically deleted. $ syctask delete --plan today --id 8,12 ===Settings The settings command allows to define default values for task directory and to create general purpose tasks that can be used for tracking and later statistical evaluation. Create general purpose tasks for phone and talk $ syctask setting --general PHONE,TALK List all settings $ syctask setting --list ===Info Info searches for the location of a task and lists all task directories Search for task with id 102 $ syctask info --id 102 List all task directories $ syctask info --taskdir ===Statistics Shows statistics for work and meeting times as well as for task processing Evaluate the complete log file $ syctask statistics Evaluate work times, meetings and tasks between 2013-01-01 and 2013-04-14 $ syctask statistics 2013-01-01 2013-04-14 Evaluate yesterday and today $ syctask statistics yesterday today ===Task directory and project directory The global options --taskdir and --project determine where the command finds or creates the tasks. The default task directory is ~/.tasks, so if no task directory is specified all commands obtain tasks from or create tasks in ~/.tasks. If a project is specified the tasks will be saved to or obtained from the task directories subdirectory specified with the --project flag. --taskdir --project Tasks in - - default_task_dir x - task_dir - x default_task_dir/project x x task_dir/project In the table the relation of commands to --taskdir and --project are listed. Command --taskdir --project Comment delete x x deletes the tasks in taskdir/project done x x marks tasks in taskdir/project as done help - - inspect x x lists task to edit, done, delete, plan list x x lists tasks in taskdir/project new x x creates tasks in taskdir/project plan x x retrieves tasks to plan from taskdir/projekt prio - - input to prio are planned tasks (see plan) scan x x creates scanned tasks in taskdir/project schedule - - schedules the planned tasks (see plan) start - - starts task from planned tasks (see plan) statistics - - shows statistics of time and count stop - - stops task from planned task update x x updates task in taskdir/project ===Files * ID id file contains the last issued id. * IDS ids file contains all issued ids. * Task files The tasks are named ID.task where ID is any Integer as 10.task. The files are saved as YAML files and can be edited directly. * Planned tasks files The planned tasks are save to YYYY-MM-DD_planned_tasks in syctask's system directory. Each task is saved with the task's directory and the ID. * Schedule files The schedule is saved to YYYY-MM-DD_time_schedule in the default task directory. The files are saved as YAML files and can be changed manually. * Log file Creating schedule and task processings is logged to tasks.log. For example when a task is started and stopped this is action is saved to tasks.log. * Tracked file A started task is saved to tracked_tasks. A semaphore file is created with ID.track when the task ID is started. When the task is stopped the semaphore file is deleted. * General purpose tasks With syctask setting -g PHONE so called general purpose tasks can be created. These tasks can be used for time tracking and later statistic evaluation to determine the amount of disturbences e.g. by phone. These tasks are saved to default_tasks. The general purpose tasks itself are also saved to the .syc/syctask directory as regular task files. * Default task dir The default task that is used e.g. with list is saved to default_tasks_dir. This can be set with the setting command. ==Working with syctask To work with syctask and get the most out of it there is to follow a certain process. ===Creating a schedule ==== View tasks In the morning before I start to work I scan my tasks with syctask list or syctask inspect to get an overview of my open tasks. $ syctask list ==== Plan tasks Next I start the planning phase with syctask plan. If I have a specific schedule for the day I will filter for the respective tasks $ syctask plan ==== Prioritize tasks (optionally) If I want to process the tasks in a specific sequence I prioritize the tasks with $ syctask prio ==== Create schedule I create a schedule with my working hours and meetings that have been scheduled with $ syctask -w "8:00-18:00" -b "9:00-10:00,14:30-16:00" -m "Team,Status" ==== Create an agenda I assign the topics I want to discuss in the meetings to the meetings with syctask schedule -a "A:1,3,6;B:3,5" ==== Start a task To begin I start the first task in the schedule with syctask start -p ID (where ID is the ID of the planned (-p) tasks) $ syctask start -p 10 ==== End a task To end the task I invoke $ syctask stop This will stop the last started task ==== Re-schedule a task If I cannot finish a task than I update the task with a new follow-up date $ syctask update 23 -f tomorrow The task will be shown in the today's schedule as done. ==== Complete a task When the task is done I call $ syctask done 23 ===Attachements * E-mails If an e-mail creates a task I create a new task with syctask new title_of_task. The subject of the e-mail I prepend with the ID and move the e-mail to a &lt;b&gt;open topics&lt;/b&gt; directory. * Files If I create files in the course of a task I create a folder in the task directory with the ID and save the files in this directory. If there is an existing directory I link to the file from the ID directory ==Supported platform syc-task has been tested with 1.9.3. It also works in Windows using Cygwin. ==Add TAB-completion to syctask To activate bash's TAB-completion following lines have to be added to ~/.bashrc complete -F get_syctask_commands syctask function get_syctask_commands { if [ -z $2 ] ; then COMPREPLY=(`syctask help -c`) else COMPREPLY=(`syctask help -c $2`) fi } After ~/.bashrc has been updated the shell session has to be restarted with $ source ~/.bashrc Now syctask followed by TAB TAB will print $ syctask &lt;TAB&gt;&lt;TAB&gt; delete done list plan scan stop _doc help new prio schedule start update To complete a command we can type $ syctask sch&lt;TAB&gt; which will complete to $ syctask schedule ==Output to Printer To print syctask's output to a printer pipe the command to lpr $ syctask schedule | lpr This will print the schedule to the default printer. To determine all available printer lpstat can be used with the lpstat -a command $ lpstat -a Canon-LBP6650-3470 accepting requests since Sat 16 Mar 2013 04:26:15 PM CET Dell-B1160w-Mono accepting requests since Sat 16 Mar 2013 04:27:45 PM CET To print to Dell-B1160w-Mono the following command can be used $ syctask schedule | lpr -P Dell-B1160w-Mono ==Release Notes ===Version 0.0.1 Implementation of new, update, list and done commands. ===Version 0.0.4 * delete: deleting tasks or remove tasks from a task plan * plan: plan tasks and add them to the task plan * schedule: create a schedule with work and busy time and assign the tasks from the task plan to the free times ===Version 0.0.6 * start: start a task and track the lead time * stop: stop the tracking and print the lead time of the task * start, stop: the task is logged in the ~/.tasks/task.log file when added and when stopped * prio: prioritize tasks in the task plan, that is specifying the sequence in that the tasks should be conducted * plan: --move flag added to move tasks from the specified plan to another days task plan * update, new: when a follow-up or a due date is provided the task is added to the provided dates task plan. If both dates are set the task is added to both dates task plans ===Version 0.0.7 * updated rdoc ===Version 0.1.15 * IDs are now unique independent of the task or project directory. After upgrading from a version 0.0.7 or older the user asked whether to re-index the tasks. It is adviced to tar the tasks before re-indexing with $ tar cvfz tasks.tar.gz .tasks other_task_directories * start will now show a timer in the upper right corner of the screen when started with the -t (--timer) flag. $ syctask start 10 -t In order to use the task timer ncurses has to be installed as the task timer uses tput from the ncurses library. * The schedule has a heading with the schedule's date and the working time * Planned tasks are now added at or after the current time if they are not done yet. Done tasks are shown in the past with the actual processing time. Tasks done before the start of the schedule are not shown in the schedule. * Meetings that are at the current time are indicated with a *. Active tasks are indicated with a star, re-scheduled tasks are indicated with a ~. * Assigning tasks to meetings in a schedule is now done with the task ID * Statistics show statistics about work time, meeting times, general purpose tasks and task processing. Total, min, max and average time and count is listed. If you have used version 0.0.7 it is adviced to delete tasks.log that lives in ~/.tasks before upgrading or in ~/.syc/syctask after upgrading. Otherwise the statistic results seem odd. * Meeting time in time line now shows correct duration * Info command searches for the location of a task and lists all task task directories with the tasks contained. * Plan move command sets the duration to the remaining processing time but at least to 15 minutes * With the setting command the default task directory can be set and general purpose tasks can be created. A general purpose task can be used for tracking to analyse how much time for phone calls is occupied. setting -l list all general purpose tasks and the default task directory * Prio command now takes a position flag together with the order flag to determine where to insert the newly ordered tasks * All commands that take an ID as argument (done, edit, start, update) look up the task file associated to the id in the ids file. If it is found the provided task directory is not considered for the task file. If the id is not contained in the ids file the task is looked up in the provided directory * Inspect command allows to list each today's unplanned task to edit, delete, mark as done or plan * Update command now has a duration flag to set the task's duration ====Version 0.2.0 * Migrated from TestUnit to Minitest * Implemented _timeleap_ {&lt;img src="https://badge.fury.io/rb/timeleap.svg" alt="Gem Version" /&gt;}[http://badge.fury.io/rb/timeleap] which allows to specify additional time distances to yesterday, today tomorrow. Time distances come in two flavors as long and short forms. Examples for long forms are - yesterday|today|tomorrow - next|previous_monday|tuesday|...|sunday - monday|tuesday|...|sunday_in|back_1_week|month|year - in|back_10_days|weeks|months|years Examples for short forms are - y|tod|tom - n|pmo|tu|..|su - mo|tu|...|sui|b1w|m|y - i|b10d|w|m|y ====Version 0.2.1 * Fix a bug in `syctask delete --plan` * Add indicator '&gt;' to task list when task contains notes * Refactor migration from version 0.0.7 and when user has deleted system files. The user can now specify the directories where the tasks are located and can also define directories to be excluded. This is especially helpful to omit search in large mounted directories, like from NAS servers. ====Version 0.3.1 * Add csv output spearated by ';' to the list command * Fix bug when schedule file is empty * Add scan command to scan tasks from files ====Version 0.3.2 * Fix bugs of missing class lib/syctask/scanner.rb ====Version 0.4.2 * delete command can take now ranges of ids, e.g. 1,2,4-8,5,20-25 * inspect can now go back in the task list * inspect will now show the updated task after making changes to the task in edit * inspect allows to specify a follow_up date * scan will ignore columns that are not part of a syctask task * scan recognizes 'Follow-up' as well as 'follow_up' now. That is an underscore can be replaced with '-' * Fix bug when scanning tables that have spaces between separator and column * When tasks.log file is missing `syctask inspect` prints warning with reason why statistics cannot be printed ==Development Pull from Github and then run $ bundle install New classes have to be added to 'lib/syctask.rb' Debugging the interface can be done with GLI_DEBUG: $ bundle exec env GLI_DEBUG=true bin/syctask Building and pushing the gemfile to Rubygems $ gem build syctask.gemspec $ gem push syc-task-0.2.1.gem ==Tests The test files live in the folder test and start with test_. There is a rake file available to run all tests $ rake test The CLI is tested with Cucumber. To run the Cucumber features in verbose mode $ cucumber or if you prefer cleaner output run $ rake features ==License syc-task is released under the {MIT License}[http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT] ==Links * [http://www.github.com/sugaryourcoffee/syc-task] - Source code on GitHub * [https://rubygems.org/gems/syc-task] - RubyGems