Getting Rspec + autotest working on windows

Question

I have installed growl + rspec + autotest on my windows 7 machine. From the command prompt, when I type 'rspec spec/' it doesn't work. The tests will only run if I use 'rake spec/' + 'autotest'.

Also, I am running these tests: http://railstutorial.org/chapters/static-pages#code:default_pages_controller_spec (i.e. very, very trivial) and they are taking 8.11 seconds.

They also fail when I run them - even though they don't in the example. I have done everything the tutorial told me, the problem is the tutorial doesn't go too deep into installing rspec on a Windows machine. It gives a link, but even then you have to kinda piece the instructions together.

The errors I get are 'Failure/Error: Unable to find C to read failed line [31mundefined methord get' for #<RSpec::Core::ExampleGroup::Nested_1::Nested_1:0x48336c0>'

The second error is very similar to that.

I have also installed Growl correctly, because I get a notification that there were two failures.

Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

I did a little googling, and according to this thread on the rspec ruby forum and this closed rspec-rails issue, this is an issue with rspec-rails that has been fixed.

I am running Ruby 1.9.2p136 on Windows 7 using rails 3.0.3.

This is what my Gemfile looked like, which shows the versions of rspec and rspec-rails that I was using:

source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '3.0.3'
gem 'sqlite3-ruby', :require => 'sqlite3'

group :development do
  gem 'rspec-rails', '2.4.1'
end

group :test do
  gem 'rspec', '2.4.0'
  gem 'webrat', '0.7.1'
end

I say "lookED like" because when I tried to run the rspec rails generator, this is what I got:

C:\Ruby\sample_app>rails generate rspec:install
  create  .rspec
  create  spec
  create  spec/spec_helper.rb
Could not find "autotest" in any of your source paths. Your current source paths
 are:
C:/Ruby/sample_app/lib/templates/rspec/install
C:/Ruby/192-stackoverflow/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rspec-rails-2.3.0/lib/generators/rspec/install/templates

So then I added autotest to my Gemfile (and did bundle install again), then tried rails generate rspec:install again and it worked with no errors. So this is what my Gemfile looks like now:

source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '3.0.3'
gem 'sqlite3-ruby', :require => 'sqlite3'

group :development do
  gem 'autotest'
  gem 'rspec-rails', '2.4.1'
end

group :test do
  gem 'rspec', '2.4.0'
  gem 'webrat', '0.7.1'
end

And the version of autotest that this installs is 4.4.6:

C:\Ruby\sample_app>bundle show autotest
C:/Ruby/192-stackoverflow/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/autotest-4.4.6

I then created the controller as instructed in the tutorial:

$ rails generate controller Pages home contact

And I was able to run both "bundle exec autotest" and "rspec spec/" without getting the error you are seeing:

C:\Ruby\sample_app>bundle exec autotest
loading autotest/rspec2
bundle exec C:\Ruby\192-stackoverflow\bin\ruby -S C:/Ruby/192-stackoverflow/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rspec-core-2.4.0/bin/rspec --tty 'C:/Ruby/sample_app/spec/controllers/pages_controller_spec.rb'
..

Finished in 23.04 seconds
2 examples, 0 failures
# I killed autotest with CTRL-c at this point
Interrupt a second time to quit
Terminate batch job (Y/N)? y
Terminate batch job (Y/N)? y


C:\Ruby\sample_app>rspec spec/
..

Finished in 23.11 seconds
2 examples, 0 failures

I also continued on with the tutorial, writing specs for the About page, while autotest was running and it was running on my changes without any problems.

So please try:

1. Updating your Gemspec to look similar to my 2nd one posted here
2. Running 'bundle install'
3. Running 'bundle exec autotest'

and let me know if that works. I will be checking back!