Automatically re-run rspec example if a Timeout::Error occurs

Question

First of all I agree that mocking external API calls is the right thing to do most of the times. However not in this case.

I'm getting random Timeout::Error exceptions in some of my tests and I would like to be able to ignore them and automatically re-run the example. Failure should be reported only after 10 unsuccessful attempts.

Any other exceptions & failures should be reported.

I've tried to implement this behavior using a global around(:each) hook in spec/spec_helper.rb file:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.around(:each) do |example|
    attempts = 0
    passed = false

    begin
      attempts +=1
      example.run
      passed = true

    rescue Timeout::Error => e
      raise e if attempts >= 10

    end until passed
  end
end

However the rescue part never gets executed when an exception occurs. Any idea why?

Thanks! Dorian

P.S. I'm using rspec 2.6.0

Answer 1

You cannot rescue exceptions in around blocks because they do not propagate. However, if you absolutely must re-run failing examples, you can pry the current exception out of @example, like here:

https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara/blob/c21d5eb2375b610ac13f54cf240e59c80918a2f1/spec/spec_helper.rb#L16

It looks pretty nasty. Our excuse was a bug in our upstream library, but I would generally avoid this if at all possible.