Module: RSpec::Core::Formatters

Defined in:
lib/rspec/core/formatters.rb,
lib/rspec/core/formatters/helpers.rb,
lib/rspec/core/formatters/html_printer.rb,
lib/rspec/core/formatters/base_formatter.rb,
lib/rspec/core/formatters/html_formatter.rb,
lib/rspec/core/formatters/json_formatter.rb,
lib/rspec/core/formatters/snippet_extractor.rb,
lib/rspec/core/formatters/progress_formatter.rb,
lib/rspec/core/formatters/base_text_formatter.rb,
lib/rspec/core/formatters/text_mate_formatter.rb,
lib/rspec/core/formatters/deprecation_formatter.rb,
lib/rspec/core/formatters/documentation_formatter.rb

Overview

Built-in Formatters

  • progress (default) - prints dots for passing examples, F for failures, * for pending
  • documentation - prints the docstrings passed to describe and it methods (and their aliases)
  • html
  • textmate - html plus links to editor
  • json - useful for archiving data for subsequent analysis

The progress formatter is the default, but you can choose any one or more of the other formatters by passing with the --format (or -f for short) command-line option, e.g.

rspec --format documentation

You can also send the output of multiple formatters to different streams, e.g.

rspec --format documentation --format html --out results.html

This example sends the output of the documentation formatter to $stdout, and the output of the html formatter to results.html.

Custom Formatters

You can tell RSpec to use a custom formatter by passing its path and name to the rspec commmand. For example, if you define MyCustomFormatter in path/to/my_custom_formatter.rb, you would type this command:

rspec --require path/to/my_custom_formatter.rb --format MyCustomFormatter

The reporter calls every formatter with this protocol:

  • start(expected_example_count)
  • zero or more of the following
    • example_group_started(group)
    • example_started(example)
    • example_passed(example)
    • example_failed(example)
    • example_pending(example)
    • message(string)
  • stop
  • start_dump
  • dump_pending
  • dump_failures
  • dump_summary(duration, example_count, failure_count, pending_count)
  • seed(value)
  • close

You can either implement all of those methods or subclass RSpec::Core::Formatters::BaseTextFormatter and override the methods you want to enhance.

See Also:

Defined Under Namespace

Modules: Helpers Classes: BaseFormatter, BaseTextFormatter, DeprecationFormatter, DocumentationFormatter, HtmlFormatter, HtmlPrinter, JsonFormatter, ProgressFormatter, SnippetExtractor, TextMateFormatter