RSpec tags and opts for easier test execution

RSpec tags and opts for easier test execution.md

To easily limit the execution of RSpec tests while you are developing use the power of the .rspec opts file and RSpec tags.

Tags can be added to any RSpec method describe, context, it, etc.

The are simply arguments passed as a Hash to the method.

describe 'foo', focus: true do
  context 'bar', slow: true do
    it 'uses the database', db: true do

The above example shows a couple different tags you can try. They can really be any valid Ruby symbol but :focus and :skip are traditional.

You can call rspec to either run only the tags or to ignore the tags.

be rspec --tag ~db skips all the :db tagged specs. be rspec --tag focus runs all the specs inside the describe block.

RSpec uses an opt file that can exist in your local directory and your home directory. The home directory file sets your global defaults but the local file will override those settings.

Copy and paste this into your command line to get started with running :focus specs via tags instead of having to always pass a line number to your rspec commands.

echo "--color --no-profile --format Fuubar --deprecation-out log/rspec-deprecations.log --tag focus" > ~/.rspec

Remove the --tag focus line to run all specs (hint the above snippet will tell RSpec to only run :focus tagged specs).

Run rspec --help for more ways to customize your RSpec experience.