Aruba-Doubles

Cucumber Steps to double Command Line Applications

Introduction

Sometimes it is just plain hard to test the system under test (SUT) because it depends on other components that cannot be used in the test environment. This could be because they aren't available, they will not return the results needed for the test or because executing them would have undesirable side effects. In other cases, our test strategy requires us to have more control or visibility of the internal behavior of the SUT.

When we are writing a test in which we cannot (or chose not to) use a real depended-on component (DOC), we can replace it with a Test Double. The Test Double doesn't have to behave exactly like the real DOC; it merely has to provide the same API as the real one so that the SUT thinks it is the real one!

— Gerard Meszaros, xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code, Copyright © 2007, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 978-0131495050.

Aruba-Doubles is a Cucumber extention to temporarily "replace" selected Command Line Applications by Test Doubles. This allows you to simply stub these applications, fake their output and check if and how they have been called.

(Aruba-Doubles is not an official part of Aruba but a good companion in the same domain, hence the name.)

Usage

If you have a Gemfile, add aruba-doubles. Otherwise, install it like this:

gem install aruba-doubles

Then, require the step definitions in a ruby files below features/support (e.g. env.rb):

require 'aruba-doubles/cucumber'

Usage examples can be found in the features directory.

How it works

Aruba-Doubles does the following:

Hijack the PATH variable by injecting a temporary doubles directory in front of it.
Create Test Doubles (which are executable Ruby scripts) inside the doubles directory.
Restore the old PATH and remove all Test Doubles after each scenario.

This way your SUT will pick up the Test Double instead of the real Command Line Application.

Caveats

Aruba-Double won't work, if your command:

calls other commands with absolute path, i.e. /usr/local/kill_the_cat
defines its own PATH
calls build-in commands from your shell like echo (but who want to stub that)

Also note that doubles will be created as scripts in temporary directories on your filesystem, which might slow down your tests.

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally. Note: the existing tests may fail
Commit, do not mess with Rakefile, gemspec or History. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.