JtestR, RubyGems, and external code

One question I've gotten a few times now that people are starting to use JtestR, is how to make it work with external libraries. This is actually two different questions, masquerading as one. The first one regard the libraries that are already included with JtestR, such as JRuby, RSpec or ActiveSupport. There is an open bug in JIRA for this, called JTESTR-57, but the reason I've been a bit hesitant to add this functionality until now, is because JtestR actually does some pretty hairy things in places. Especially the JRuby integration does ClassLoader magic that can potentially be quite version dependent. The RSpec and Mocha integration is the same. I don't actually modify these libraries, but the code using them is a bit brittle at the moment. I've worked on fixing this by providing patches to the framework maintainers to include the hook functionality I need. This has worked with great success for both Expectations and RSpec.

That said, I will provide something that allows you to use local versions of these libraries, at your own risk. It will probably be part of 0.4, and if you're interested JTESTR-57 is the one to follow.

The second problem is a bit more complicated. You will have seen this problem if you try to do "require 'rubygems'". JtestR does not include RubyGems. There are both tecnnical and non-technical reasons for this. Simply, the technical problem is that RubyGems is coded in such a way that it doesn't interact well with loading things from JAR-packaged files. That means I can't distribute the full JtestR in one JAR-file if I wanted RubyGems, and that's just unacceptable. I need to be able to bundle everything in a way that makes it easy to use.

The non-technical reason is a bit more subtle. If RubyGems can be used in your tests, it encourages locally installed gems. It's a bit less pain to do it that way initially, but remember that as soon as you check the tests in to version control (you are using version control, right?) it will break in unexpected ways if other persons using the code doesn't have the same gems installed, with the same versions.

Luckily, it's quite simple to work provide functionality to JtestR, even if no gems are used. The first step is to create a directory that contains all the third party code. I will call it test_lib and place it in the root of the project. After you have done that you must first unpack your gems:

mkdir test_lib
cd test_lib
jruby -S gem unpack activerecord

When you have the gems you want unpacked in this directory, you can add something like this to your jtestr_config.rb:

Dir["test_lib/*/lib"].each do |dir|
  $LOAD_PATH << dir
end

And finally you can load the libraries you need:

require 'active_record'