Snailgun and Cucumber

N.B. Snailgun’s functionality overlaps significantly with Spork and --drb. You may wish to try them both out and see which works for you.

snailgun drastically reduces the startup time of each test run, by preloading a process with Rails and your chosen gems, and then forking it for each run so that only your application files are loaded. Note that it only works under Unix/Linux systems.

snailgun-1.0.5 now supports cucumber with an “fcucumber” shortcut. Install with sudo gem install snailgun. Example:

snailgun --rails cucumber
fcucumber -q

That’s all you need. The first line preloads a process with RAILS_ENV=cucumber; the second starts cucumber by forking this process. You can also use frake cucumber.

NOTE: to make your model classes be loaded afresh on each run you need to set config.cache_classes = false in config/environments/cucumber.rb. Cucumber will give a big warning saying that this is known to be a problem with transactional fixtures. Take care if this is important to you.

For a substantial reduction in startup time, remove :lib=>false settings from config/environments/cucumber.rb so that cucumber, webrat, nokogiri etc are preloaded.

If you use regular unit and functional tests as well as cucumber, then

snailgun --rails cucumber,test

will start two processes, and frake test will use the one preloaded with RAILS_ENV=test.

Snailgun is also useful for more than testing. If you do

snailgun --rails cucumber,test,development

then you can also use fconsole for a quick-start development console, and fruby script/server for a quick-start web server.

More info at the github snailgun page