Ryan Bigg

I’m going to expand on a tweet I wrote this morning:

Thinking more and more that spec/support is an anti-pattern. I don’t want everything required for every test.

I came to this thought when I was working on sharing testing support code between an engine and an application, for an example in Chapter 4 of Multitenancy with Rails. What I had originally was a file in spec/support called SubdomainHelpers, defined like this:

module SubdomainHelpers
  def within_account_subdomain(&block)
    context "within a subdomain" do
      let(:subdomain_url) { "http://#{account.subdomain}.example.com" }
      before { Capybara.default_host = subdomain_url } 
      after { Capybara.default_host = "http://example.com" }
      yield
    end
  end
end

This module is then used to extend the RSpec describe blocks, like this

describe "User sign in" do
  extend SubdomainHelpers
  ...
end

And then we can call within_account_subdomain whenever we need it.

My problem with this is that this file is required all the damn time, even in tests which don’t use Capybara. The culprit is this default line in spec/spec_helper.rb

Dir[File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/support/**/*.rb"].each {|f| require f }

This line is used for requiring all the files in spec/support so that you don’t have to. Seems like a good idea, but isn’t once you have a ton of things in spec/support.

Making it easy to require the file defining SubdomainHelpers in both the engine and the application involves moving the helper in to the lib directory of the engine, and then requiring that file in the appropriate places:

require 'subscribem/testing_support/subdomain_helpers'

Even if we weren’t using an engine and an application and just had the application, I would much rather just be requiring just the files I need for a test, like this:

require 'support/subdomain_helpers'

Than having the full range of spec/support files loaded all at once on the off chance a spec might need it. I wouldn’t expect this to dramatically increase a spec suite’s run time, but it’s got to be helping somewhat.