For the past two weeks, I’ve been going through as many Ruby tutorial projects as I could. Many of them were easy to follow but this time around, I’ve been trying my best to practice test-driven development as I go through the exercises. The contact manager tutorial by Jumpstart Lab was a great starting point for this because they follow this workflow.

I’ve been trying out different tools including rspec-rails, shoulda-matchers, factory_girl_rails, fabrication, minitest, and fixtures. So far, I’ve been using rspec more because of how it integrates with rails generators like scaffolding. Scaffolding generates the usual CRUD actions and rspec generates the associated test in the controller specs. I felt like I was cheating a little bit by using generators so much but the speed I was working through tutorials that used to take me multiple days was difficult to overlook. I found myself setting model fields and associations through the command line instead of migrations. Rspec’s syntax feels very natural and as familiar now as minitest’s assertions. At this point, I can appreciate what the generators do and I don’t have to build up Rails controller from the bottom up as long as I understand what is going on which each action and I’m testing throughout the whole process.

Commands I’ve learned

• rails g model sports_category --parent category

• rails g scaffold Comment content:text user:belongs_to post:belongs_to

• heroku git:clone -a myapp

• rails g scaffold Foo foo_string:string foo_text:text foo_integer:integer foo_float:float foo_decimal:decimal foo_timestamp:timestamp foo_time:time foo_date:date foo_binary:binary foo_boolean:boolean