RSpec hook to show current spec in process name

Readme.md

Our suite would sometimes randomly hang when running a certain spec, but we weren't able to tell which one. With the below RSpec around filter you can see the spec that is currently running by inspecting the process name.

$ rspec spec_spec.rb &
[2] 64968
$ ps | grep rspec
64968 ttys005    0:00.24 rspec /Users/miha/spec_spec.rb:10 "Dummy spec waits for 100 seconds"

spec_spec.rb

RSpec.configure do |c|
  c.around :each do |example|
    title  = example.metadata[:full_description]
    source =  example.metadata[:example_group_block].source_location.join ":"
    $0 = %{rspec #{source} "#{title}"}
    example.run
  end
end

describe "Dummy spec" do
  it "waits for 100 seconds" do
    sleep 100
  end
end

Cool hack. I think minitest listens to SIGINFO (ctrl-T, if I remember) which you can hit to get information about the current test.

+1 to this. I needed to autogenerate unique and meaningful VCR cassette names for the current example. In Minitest, getting the example string is as easy as self.class.to_s + @__name__, but it looks like Rspec makes you do extra work.

We solved this using a global before hook to save the example string to an instance variable which is available throughout the example:

# in spec_helper.rb
RSpec.configure do |config|
  # ... other config stuff
  config.before(:each) do |example|
    # ... other config stuff
    @spec_description = example.metadata[:full_description]
  end
end

Then we name our VCR cassette after that string:

# in some helper method
name = @spec_description.gsub(/[^\w]/, '').downcase
VCR.use_cassette(name) do
  # ...

Exactly what I needed! Thanks so much @mfilej for sharing!!! ❤️

Thanks a lot! It worked perfectly.
Just one thing metadata[:example_group_block] is deprecated. Use metadata[:block] instead.