How do I suppress the huge stack trace after a rake TestTask failure?

Question

I'm setting up a rakefile for a project, and I've defined some rake TestTasks. I ran a simple sanity test that does an assert_equal(1, 2) just to check the output, and, in addition to the usual failure output, I get this mess:

rake aborted!
Command failed with status (1): [/usr/bin/ruby -w -I"lib:." "/usr/lib/ruby/...]
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:993:in `block in sh'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:1008:in `call'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:1008:in `sh'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:1092:in `sh'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:1027:in `ruby'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:1092:in `ruby'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/testtask.rb:115:in `block (2 levels) in define'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:1110:in `verbose'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/testtask.rb:100:in `block in define'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:634:in `call'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:634:in `block in execute'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:629:in `each'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:629:in `execute'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:595:in `block in invoke_with_call_chain'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/monitor.rb:201:in `mon_synchronize'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:588:in `invoke_with_call_chain'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:605:in `block in invoke_prerequisites'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:602:in `each'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:602:in `invoke_prerequisites'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:594:in `block in invoke_with_call_chain'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/monitor.rb:201:in `mon_synchronize'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:588:in `invoke_with_call_chain'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:581:in `invoke'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:2041:in `invoke_task'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:2019:in `block (2 levels) in top_level'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:2019:in `each'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:2019:in `block in top_level'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:2058:in `standard_exception_handling'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:2013:in `top_level'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake.rb:1992:in `run'
/usr/bin/rake:31:in `<main>'

How do I get rid of it? I don't want to have to scroll up past 20 lines of junk to see my test failures.

Answer 1

I had the same problem as you and solved it by updating rake: gem install rake

This updated from whatever I had to 0.8.7.

I'm running 1.9.2-p180 (OS X, installed with Homebrew) and was running tests on a newly created project (made with Hoe).

Answer 2

Rake normally does not show a backtrace unless you specify --trace. Perhaps you have configured Rake to always run in --trace mode?

By default, rake does not print out the stack trace if you get an error in the code that rake calls. You can get the stack trace by running with the --trace flag, but usually I'd just rather see it anyway. You can do that by putting Rake.application.options.trace = true into the rakefile.

If not, you might try setting Rake.application.options.trace = false in your Rakefile.

Answer 3

Rake shouldn't be returning a backtrace in this situation -- the error is with the external command, not rake's internals. I've sent a email to Jim Weirich regarding the following patch: https://gist.github.com/1003628

Answer 4

I still had unwanted stack traces in rake 0.8.7, updating to 0.9.2 finally helped for me (ruby 1.9.2p180 [i386-mingw32] on Win7 32bit).