Developing gems and testing

Question

I am new to developing Ruby gems, but I thought I'd give it a try.

Recently checking out the latest episode on Railscasts (http://railscasts.com/episodes/245-new-gem-with-bundler) I'm using Bundler to create my gem.

However I'm kind of clueless on how to test my gem.

Sure I could run rake install and then require it from irb, but this seems like a kind of slow workflow for me.

What I'd like to do is create a dummy Rails app and require the gem by referencing to it's source code. Is this possible? I'm sure I've read about it somewhere…

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can include these lines in your Rakefile:

task :console do   exec "irb -r mygem -I ./lib" end 

This will create a rake task to initialize a new irb session and preload your library. Now, all you have to do is:

$ rake console 

Answer 2

I can't recommend this guide from Ryan Bigg enough: http://bundler.io/v1.16/guides/creating_gem.html. It walks you through generating a gem using Bundler and setting up automated testing. You can develop your features without ever actually having to run your code manually. It's a workflow I'm using for my own gem development and has worked very well so far.

UPDATE: Rereading your question, it sounds like your gem is a Rails engine. I'd recommending looking at José Valim's EngineX. It's a generator that creates a gem with a dummy Rails app for testing (https://github.com/josevalim/enginex). If you already have a lot of code, http://keithschacht.com/creating-a-rails-3-engine-plugin-gem/ might help you setup a dummy app for testing.