Garlic: Plugin Tests against Various Rails Versions

With Rails 2.2 around the corner, I decided to implement a scalable testing infrastructure for the declarative_authorization plugin. One great thing to notice at the RailsConf Europe was Ian’s garlic.  Though only given as a side note in Ian’s talk on resources_controller, it provides a nice way of keeping your plugin tested against all those Rails versions.

Very easy to set up.  Only add to your Rakefile a few lines that run garlic:

if File.directory?(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'garlic'))
  require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'garlic/lib/garlic_tasks')
  require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'garlic')
end
 
desc "clone the garlic repo (for running ci tasks)"
task :get_garlic do
  sh "git clone git://github.com/ianwhite/garlic.git garlic"
end

And define the tasks that garlic should perform for you.  In the declarative_authorization case, garlic should retrieve the plugin from the current path and take a few Rails versions as targets. For the test run, garlic just needs to run “rake”. This is the necessary recipe:

garlic do
  repo 'rails', :url => 'git://github.com/rails/rails'
  repo 'declarative_authorization', :path => '.'
 
  target 'edge'
  target '2.1-stable', :branch => 'origin/2-1-stable'
  target '2.2.0-RC1', :tag => 'v2.2.0'
 
  all_targets do
    prepare do
      plugin 'declarative_authorization', :clone => true
    end
 
    run do
      cd "vendor/plugins/declarative_authorization" do
        sh "rake"
      end
    end
  end
end

Thus, all that is needed to check my current declarative_authorization branch against all defined Rails versions is

rake get_garlic # just once
rake garlic:all

Great, all declarative_authorization tests pass on 2.2.0-RC1!

All specified targets passed: edge, 2.1-stable, 2.2.0-RC1

Posted by Steffen Bartsch at 10:52 pm on October 28th, 2008.
Categories: Ruby on Rails. Tags: .