Fivemat

Why settle for a test output format when you can have a test output fivemat?

I’m tired of the two de facto standards for test output:

  1. Bunch of dots — Wait till the end to see what failed, and guess the dot count to estimate progress.
  2. Extreme verbosity — See failures as they happen if you pay very, very close attention.

In other words, you can choose between “too little” or “too much.”

I’ve looked at third party alternatives, but none of them did much for me. What I want is the middle ground: dots grouped by file. Thus, I give you Fivemat:

DoohickeyTest ....
KajiggerTest .........................F...........
  1) Failure:
  test_isnt_actually_nil(KajiggerTest) [test/kajigger_test.rb:17]:
  Expected nil to not be nil.
WhatchamacallitTest ................................................
WidgetTest ...E......
  2) Error:
  ZeroDivisionError: divided by 0
      test/widget_test.rb:20:in `/'
      test/widget_test.rb:20:in `test_dividing_by_1'

MiniTest, RSpec, and Cucumber are supported. Here, have some sample Cucumber output:

features/sign_in.feature ......F--........
  no button with value or id or text 'Go' found (Capybara::ElementNotFound)
  ./features/step_definitions/web_steps.rb:53:in `/^I press "([^"]*)"$/'
  ./features/sign_in.feature:10:in `When I press "Log In"'
features/sign_out.feature .......
features/sign_up.feature ...............................................

Enable profiling by setting the FIVEMAT_PROFILE variable in the environment:

> FIVEMAT_PROFILE=1 rspec --format Fivemat
Doohickey .... (0.27s)
Kajigger ..................................... (1.87s)

Usage

Start by adding gem 'fivemat' to your Gemfile.

MiniTest

On MiniTest 5, it’s loaded automatically as a plugin, and there’s nothing else to do. Otherwise, change require 'minitest/autorun' to require 'fivemat/minitest/autorun'. Or with Rails, add require 'fivemat/minitest' to test/test_helper.rb. If it doesn’t work, you may need a newer version of MiniTest. (Add gem 'minitest' to your Gemfile if it’s not there already.)

RSpec

Add --format Fivemat to .rspec.

Cucumber

Add --format Fivemat to cucumber.yml.

Contributing

Don’t forget to include test coverage for any changes you introduce. (Ha! I kid! Everybody knows it’s impossible to test a test library.)

License

Copyright © Tim Pope. MIT License.