Outputting (puts, print) in Rails Unit Tests

Question

How come commands like puts and print don't show up in the console when running ActiveSupport::TestCase tests?

Makes it very hard to debug if I can't outputs some inspections in a couple of methods.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use the rails logger to see your output:

Rails::logger.debug "Interesting stuff"

Run tail -f log/test.log on the command line (from the project's root in a separate Terminal tab or window) to see the results.

Answer 2

I've just been struggling with this under rails (3.2). I don't know how things have changed between versions but the answers don't actually answer the question. Rather using

$stdout.puts msg

outputs to the console along with the other console messages when running individual tests.

Answer 3

I use puts all the time in tests when I'm quickly hacking debugging a single test. So I don't use rake test:*, rather run the individual test and the output shows up.

ruby -Itest test/unit/user/context_test.rb

Answer 4

You can use puts in an individual test as follows eg:

puts "\n\n #{@object.name}"

This will look something like as follows in your terminal window as the tests run

Started E...EEE

United Kingdom .E

Finished in 2.787886 seconds.

(where @object.name == "United Kingdom" in this case)

It's quite a crude method but very quick for simple debugging