A keyboard shortcut to run tests with watchr

When developing in rails I use watchr to run the tests each time a file is saved, but lots of times I find my self adding a whitespace or a newline and saving just to trigger watchr and run the tests.

I wanted to have is a simple keyboard shortcut (like F15) to tell watchr to run the last spec, and mpartel (thx! : ) gave me an idea on how to do it, so here it is:

Dependencies

Obviously you need watchr, but we're also going to need pgrep that will help us find out the pid of the watchr process. So go ahead and do

sudo port install proctools

brew install proctools

A config file for watchr

Now you need a .watchr config file that you can put in you RAILS_ROOT. Mine looks like this:

@last_file ||= ""
def run_spec(file)
  @last_file = file
  unless File.exist?(file)
    puts "#{file} does not exist"
    return
  end
  
  puts "Running #{file}"
  system "rspec --color --drb  --tag current --format Fuubar #{file}"
  puts
end

watch("spec/.*/*_spec\.rb") do |match|
  run_spec match[0]
end

watch("app/(.*/.*)\.rb") do |match|
  run_spec %{spec/#{match[1]}_spec.rb}
end

Signal.trap("USR1") do
  run_spec @last_file
end

Now you can launch watchr with watchr .watchr and it will be listening for the "USR1" signal to run the last spec.