RSpec 3.8 has been released!

Myron Marston and Jon Rowe

RSpec 3.8 has just been released! Given our commitment to semantic versioning, this should be an easy upgrade for anyone already using RSpec 3, but if we did introduce any regressions, please let us know, and we’ll get a patch release out with a fix ASAP.

We’re also happy to announce that Benoit Tigeot has joined the RSpec team since the last release. Welcome to the team, Benoit! We know you’ll do great things :).

RSpec continues to be a community-driven project with contributors from all over the world. This release includes 369 commits and 98 merged pull requests from 52 different contributors!

Thank you to everyone who helped make this release happen!

Notable Changes

Core: Performance of –bisect has been significantly improved

RSpec has supported a --bisect feature since RSpec 3.3. This feature is useful when your test suite has an ordering dependency–that is, the suite only fails when the tests are run in a specific order. --bisect will repeatedly run smaller and smaller subsets of your suite in order to narrow it down to the minimal set of specs needed to reproduce the failures.

Since 3.3, this feature has been implemented by shelling out to the rspec command to run each subset. While simple and effective, we realized this approach was also quite inefficient. Each time the rspec command runs, it must boot RSpec and your application environment (which may include Rails and many other gems) from scratch. The cost of this can vary considerably from a couple hundred milliseconds to 30+ seconds on a large Rails app. In extreme cases, the runtime of --bisect can be dominated by the time it takes to boot your application environment over and over and over.

In RSpec 3.8, we’ve improved bisect’s performance by using forking on platforms that support it rather than shelling out. That way, we can boot your application environment once, and then fork a subprocess in which to run each subset of the test suite, avoiding the need to boot your application many times.

The actual improvement you’ll see in practice will vary widely, but in our limited testing it improved the runtime of --bisect by 33% in one case and an order-of-magnitude (108.9 seconds down to 11.7 seconds) in another.

If you’re looking to maximize the benefit of this change, you may want to pass some additional --require options when running a bisection in order to pre-load as much of your application environment as possible.

Core: Support the XDG base directory spec for configuration

RSpec, like many command line tools, supports the use of options files, which can live at .rspec (for team project options) ~/.rspec (for global personal options) or at .rspec-local (for personal project options – this file should not be under source control). In RSpec 3.8, we’ve expanded this feature to support the XDG Base Directory Specification, which defines a standard way for tools to locate the global personal options file. This gives users complete control over where this file is located rather than forcing it to live in their home directory.

To use this feature, simply set the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable and put your RSpec options at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/rspec/options.

For more info, read the spec or check out the pull request.

Thanks to Magnus Bergmark for implementing this feature!

Expectations: Formatted output length is now configurable

When setting expectations on large objects their string representations can become rather unwieldy and can clutter the console output. In RSpec 3.6, we started truncating these objects to address this issue, but did not make it easily configurable.

In RSpec 3.8, you can now configure it:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.expect_with :rspec do |expectations|
    expectations.max_formatted_output_length = 200
  end
end

You can also disable the truncation entirely by setting the config option to nil.

Rails: have_http_status matcher upgraded to support Rails 5.2

A change in Rails 5.2 caused RSpec’s have_http_status matcher to issue deprecation warnings. In RSpec 3.8, these warnings have been removed.

Rails: View specs stub_template performance improved.

Thanks to Simon Coffey for implementing caching for stub_template that prevents unnecessary recreation of templates. This improves performance by reducing the amount of allocation and setup performed.

Rails: rails_helper.rb improvements

Thank you to Koichi ITO and Alessandro Rodi for improving our generated rails_helper.rb with improved messages when migrations are pending, and bringing us in line with Rails standards.

Stats:

Combined:

• Total Commits: 369
• Merged pull requests: 98
• 52 contributors: Ace Dimasuhid, Alessandro Rodi, Alexander Panasyuk, Alyssa Ross, Andrew, Andrew Vit, Benoit Tigeot, Brad Charna, Brian Kephart, Christophe Bliard, Craig J. Bass, Daniel Colson, Douglas Lovell, Eric Hayes, Garett Arrowood, Gary Bernhardt, Gustav Munkby, James Crisp, Joel Taylor, Jon Rowe, Kenichi Kamiya, Koichi ITO, Lairan, Laura Paakkinen, Laurent Cobos, Magnus Bergmark, Matt Brictson, Maxim Krizhanovsky, Myron Marston, Nikola Đuza, Oleg Pudeyev, Olivier Lacan, Olle Jonsson, Pablo Brasero, Paul McMahon, Regan Chan, Sam Phippen, Sergiy Yarinovskiy, Shane Cavanaugh, Shia, Simon Coffey, Sorah Fukumori, Systho, Szijjártó-Nagy Misu, Tom Chen, Xavier Shay, Yuji Nakayama, arjan0307, joker1007, lsarni, n.epifanov, pavel

rspec-core:

• Total Commits: 94
• Merged pull requests: 24
• 17 contributors: Alyssa Ross, Andrew Vit, Benoit Tigeot, Garett Arrowood, Gary Bernhardt, Jon Rowe, Kenichi Kamiya, Koichi ITO, Magnus Bergmark, Myron Marston, Oleg Pudeyev, Olle Jonsson, Sam Phippen, Sorah Fukumori, Systho, Xavier Shay, arjan0307

rspec-expectations:

• Total Commits: 52
• Merged pull requests: 15
• 13 contributors: Ace Dimasuhid, Alyssa Ross, Benoit Tigeot, James Crisp, Jon Rowe, Kenichi Kamiya, Myron Marston, Pablo Brasero, Sam Phippen, Xavier Shay, Yuji Nakayama, joker1007, n.epifanov

rspec-mocks:

• Total Commits: 47
• Merged pull requests: 16
• 13 contributors: Alexander Panasyuk, Alyssa Ross, Andrew, Benoit Tigeot, James Crisp, Jon Rowe, Kenichi Kamiya, Maxim Krizhanovsky, Myron Marston, Olle Jonsson, Sam Phippen, Sergiy Yarinovskiy, Xavier Shay

rspec-rails:

• Total Commits: 132
• Merged pull requests: 27
• 29 contributors: Alessandro Rodi, Benoit Tigeot, Brad Charna, Brian Kephart, Christophe Bliard, Daniel Colson, Douglas Lovell, Eric Hayes, Joel Taylor, Jon Rowe, Kenichi Kamiya, Koichi ITO, Lairan, Laura Paakkinen, Laurent Cobos, Matt Brictson, Myron Marston, Nikola Đuza, Olivier Lacan, Paul McMahon, Regan Chan, Sam Phippen, Shane Cavanaugh, Shia, Simon Coffey, Szijjártó-Nagy Misu, Tom Chen, lsarni, pavel

rspec-support:

• Total Commits: 44
• Merged pull requests: 16
• 10 contributors: Alyssa Ross, Benoit Tigeot, Craig J. Bass, Gustav Munkby, James Crisp, Jon Rowe, Kenichi Kamiya, Myron Marston, Sam Phippen, Xavier Shay

Docs

API Docs

• rspec-core
• rspec-expectations
• rspec-mocks
• rspec-rails

Cucumber Features

• rspec-core
• rspec-expectations
• rspec-mocks
• rspec-rails

Release Notes

rspec-core-3.8.0

Full Changelog

Enhancements:

• Improve shell escaping used by RSpec::Core::RakeTask and --bisect so that it works on Pathname objects. (Andrew Vit, #2479)
• Nicely format errors encountered while loading files specified by --require option. (Myron Marston, #2504)
• Significantly improve the performance of --bisect on platforms that support forking by replacing the shell-based runner with one that uses forking so that RSpec and the application environment can be booted only once, instead of once per spec run. (Myron Marston, #2511)
• Provide a configuration API to pick which bisect runner is used for --bisect. Pick a runner via config.bisect_runner = :shell or config.bisect_runner = :fork in a file loaded by a --require option passed at the command line or set in .rspec. (Myron Marston, #2511)
• Support the XDG Base Directory Specification for the global options file. ~/.rspec is still supported when no options file is found in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/rspec/options (Magnus Bergmark, #2538)
• Extract RSpec.world.prepare_example_filtering that sets up the example filtering for custom RSpec runners. (Oleg Pudeyev, #2552)

Bug Fixes:

• Prevent an ArgumentError when truncating backtraces with two identical backtraces. (Systho, #2515, Benoit Tigeot, #2539)

rspec-expectations-3.8.0

Full Changelog

Enhancements:

• Improve failure message of change(receiver, :message) by including the receiver as SomeClass#some_message. (Tomohiro Hashidate, #1005)
• Improve change matcher so that it can correctly detect changes in deeply nested mutable objects (such as arrays-of-hashes-of-arrays). The improved logic uses the before/after hash value to see if the object has been mutated, rather than shallow duping the object. (Myron Marston, #1034)
• Improve include matcher so that pseudo-hash objects (e.g. objects that decorate a hash using a SimpleDelegator or similar) are treated as a hash, as long as they implement to_hash. (Pablo Brasero, #1012)
• Add max_formatted_output_length= to configuration, allowing changing the length at which we truncate large output strings. (Sam Phippen #951, Benoit Tigeot #1056)
• Improve error message when passing a matcher that doesn’t support block expectations to a block based expect. (@nicktime, #1066)

rspec-mocks-3.8.0

Full Changelog

Bug Fixes:

• Issue error when encountering invalid “counted” negative message expectations. (Sergiy Yarinovskiy, #1212)
• Ensure allow_any_instance_of and expect_any_instance_of can be temporarily supressed. (Jon Rowe, #1228)
• Ensure expect_any_instance_of(double).to_not have_received(:some_method) fails gracefully (as its not supported) rather than issuing a NoMethodError. (Maxim Krizhanovsky, #1231)

rspec-rails-3.8.0

Full Changelog

Enhancements:

• Improved message when migrations are pending in the default rails_helper.rb (Koichi ITO, #1924)
• have_http_status matcher now supports Rails 5.2 style response symbols (Douglas Lovell, #1951)
• Change generated Rails helper to match Rails standards for Rails.root (Alessandro Rodi, #1960)
• At support for asserting enqueued jobs have no wait period attached. (Brad Charna, #1977)
• Cache instances of ActionView::Template used in stub_template resulting in increased performance due to less allocations and setup. (Simon Coffey, #1979)
• Rails scaffold generator now respects longer namespaces (e.g. api/v1/<thing>). (Laura Paakkinen, #1958)

Bug Fixes:

• Escape quotation characters when producing method names for system spec screenshots. (Shane Cavanaugh, #1955)
• Use relative path for resolving fixtures when fixture_path is not set. (Laurent Cobos, #1943)
• Allow custom template resolvers in view specs. (@ahorek, #1941)

rspec-support-3.8.0

Full Changelog

Bug Fixes:

• Order hash keys before diffing to improve diff accuracy when using mocked calls. (James Crisp, #334)