How to check entire rails project for compilation errors

Question

I am new to ruby and rails. I am used to working in IDEs (Xcode, Visual Studio, etc.) where I can perform project-wide/workspace-wide "build/compile" operations.

Let's say that I modify a number of ruby files in my rails project. I haven't yet written tests that will exercise all of my changes.

Is there a way to ensure that all of my *.rb files compile without directly exercising them at runtime? I'd really just like to perform a "compile all of my ruby/erb files" operation so that I know that I don't currently have any syntax errors.

UPDATE

I probably should have mentioned that I've been writing code professionally for 20 years. I realize that Ruby isn't compiled like, say, C++, but that doesn't mean that its syntax can't be checked. In my case, I've decided to use ruby-lint to catch basic syntax errors without having to exercise the code at runtime.

Answer 1

If you're on Linux or Mac or some funny windows box with the gnu find command, you can do something like:

find /your/application_directory -name=*.rb -exec ruby -c {} \;

This will find all ruby scripts in the app directory and run ruby -c on them, which will run a syntax check and respond with Syntax OK or an error message if there is an error in the script.

You can also create a macro of this to your editor, so that when you save or press a key combination it will run ruby -c on the file and give you the results. In vim you can use this in your .vimrc :

map <Leader>c :w !ruby -c<cr>

Which maps Leader-c to write the file and check it's syntax using ruby -c.

Verifying your rake-tasks and views for syntax errors might be a little trickier, but many of the templating engines like haml have similiar -c syntax check parameter.