Shoulda Matchers 2.0

Shoulda Matchers has been around for a long time. Unfortunately, it’s starting to suffer from feature bloat so we’re narrowing its focus to keep releases fast and the maintenance burden low.

Removing Deprecated Matchers

The following matchers were deprecated in 1.5 and will be removed in 2.0 . If you’re currently using these methods you should consider testing the code in another way.

assign_to

The assign_to matcher allows you to ensure you have set an instance variable properly. We do not use this because we typically cover those types of assertions implicitly through an integration test. An integration test may be slower than a unit test, but it provides more thorough coverage.

validate_format_of

The validate_format_of matcher allows you to perform the same operation as the allow_value matcher. Please use the allow_value matcher instead.

should validate_format_of(:email).with('user@example.com')
should allow_value('user@example.com').for(:email )

have_sent_email

We recommend email-spec for testing emails in your apps. It has the added benefit of working with your integration suite as well as your unit tests.

respond_with_content_type

The respond_with_content_type matcher is not a matcher we use often. This behavior can be tested using the response object in your controller tests without the need for a matcher.

query_the_database

We do not have a recommended solution for a replacement on this matcher.

Matchers Removed Temporarily

The strong_parameters and delegate matchers will also be removed in 2.0. We ran into some trouble implementing them but hope to re-implement them in a less troublesome way soon.

New Hotness

As part of the move to 2.0, we will also be dropping support for Rails 2 & ruby 1.8. We will continue to support Rails 3.x and ruby 1.9.x and will be adding support for ruby 2.0 soon.

Keeping it tight

We are trying to keep Shoulda Matchers a tight focused gem and make sure the matchers we do support are as robust and thorough as possible. Do you think there are any other matchers we should remove?

Written by Jason Draper.

SHOULDA BEEN GONE

We haven’t been taking pull requests on shoulda-matchers as much as we shoulda, but it’s back in the spotlight now. Shoulda’s been gone … but it’s back.

Here are the new features in shoulda-matchers 1.1.0:

• A NEWS file so you can track new hottness in REAL TIME
• shoulda-matchers’ very first dependency: ActiveSupport >= 3.0.0. This was an implicit dependency for a while, but now it’s official.
• An only_integer option for validates_numericality_of
• A query_the_database matcher, so that you can do it { should query_the_database(4.times).or_less }
• Database column primality is correctly checked
• The flash matcher can check specific keys using [], like so: it { should set_the_flash[:alert].to("Bad username") }
• A validates_confirmation_of matcher: it { should validate_confirmation_of(:password) }
• A serialize matcher: it { should serialize(:details).as(Hash).as_instance_of(Hash) }
• A have_sent_email matcher can now check reply_to: it { should have_sent_email.reply_to([user, other]) }
• An accept_nested_attributes matcher

If you filed a pull request and we didn’t take a look, please re-submit or ping me on Github. We’d love to hear from you.

This Week in Open Source

clearance

Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw - that’s me!) cleaned up the clearance Rakefile a bit (4f016db).

factory_girl

Joshua Clayton (joshuaclayton) released version 3.1.0 of factory_girl (f1d3018). For the full list of changes, see the NEWS file. Josh updated a few dependencies too (20becc9, 29157d6). Kristian Mandrup (kristianmandrup) added the ability to alias sequences, just like you can alias factories (f387e38, 178a7ab). To see how to use it, see the documentation (f013335) he added for it. I love documentation pull requests.

factory_girl_rails

Joshua Clayton (joshuaclayton) bumped factory_girl_rails to version 3.1.0 (4259e4c) to match factory_girl’s new version.

paperclip

Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) released version 3.0.2 (240147e) of paperclip. Unfortunately, the NEWS file hasn’t been updated for 3.0.2 yet. Prem removed an obsolete generator, then added a test for it (a2a4c7a, 03700c8). Preston Guillory (pguillory) fixed a typo (853595a). Typo fixes are always welcome! Michael Galero (mikong) pluralized the table name in the migration generator to follow Rails convention (28e2d1b). And Rafael Mendonça França (rafaelfranca) removed init.rb, since plugins will be deprecated in Rails 4.0 (ae7b7c5).

shoulda-matchers

Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw - me again!) finally released a new version of shoulda-matchers! Version 1.1.0 has a bunch of changes that you can see in the NEWS file. One of the noteworthy changes is that shoulda-matchers now depends on ActiveSupport >= 3.0.0 (c65e43a), meaning it’s Rails 3-only. We’ve been only testing against Rails 3 for a while, so this just makes it official. Gabe made a couple of documentation fixes (9203275, 8fcc3d2, a4edff0) and also cleaned up the code (5873502, 41088bc, 3039cc6, 820f216, 2e73b35, 457be62). Brendan Loudermilk (bloudermilk) added an accept_nested_attributes_for matcher (ee74222).

this-week-in-open-source

Finally, Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) fixed a little bug in this-week-in-open-source (which I used to generate this post!) to print missing directories before doing anything else (564c7c9).

This week in open source

laptop

I was reminded that I’ve been missing out on our sweet laptop script, which is a program we maintain to get a Rails environment set up on OS X as quickly as possible. So over the past week, Antonio Salazar Cardozo (Shadowfiend) fixed our capitalization of Qt (b667280), Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) fixed our capitalization of JavaScript (87fe88f), and Dan Croak (croaky) removed the deprecated Heroku Labs plugin (842cd0d) and gave instructions on installing the command-line XCode tools (a177cca).

suspenders

The suspenders gem, which has helped many people start a Rails app, now shows that the build is broken. Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) added that (76e42eb).

shoulda-matchers

The shoulda-matchers gem is a collection of RSpec matchers for various Rails things. Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) went to town on it this week, cleaning everything up in an effort to make it more pleasant to hack on (2b98e49, 09544fa, 7b3d6d0, 96df0b1, 36006d8, 4ff1344, 3b3181b, 4574f51, 1c517d2, bd52483, e70e1bf, 41bccc8). Having done that, he added a :primary option to the have_db_column matcher (68e65b2). Matthew Daubert (MDaubs) fixed a JRuby failure and also added support for Rails 3.0 (d85503f).

bourne

Due to my complaining last week, the bourne gem now has a NEWS file (8dfb077), thanks to Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw).

paperclip

So we have this gem named paperclip. You might have heard of it. This week, Tony Brewerio (tony-brewerio) fixed the :content_type validator (c4c22f8).

Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) released version 3.0.1, which breaks backward compatibility (d61ddd5, 51bb0f9, 7088f5b, e1951ed, 9ea4a9b, 36d1289, 8390516, b3f9690, 8e80310, ee4107a, b3a63ed, 8a758c2, 84d2d08, fe706c6, b54904e, d3a7427, da5d716, ee42b19, e83f88f, 03f777f, 5232b19, 19aedbc).

Jon Yurek (jyurek) merged in something he has been working on: adapters for different types of I/O (6c5fe19, e10edcd, f4b6d48, 78cfebd, 89c8d11). Adding new file-like things is now easier, including URLs that act like files. Yeah, that’s right.

Jon is so going to write a blog post about this with more explanations, after he updates the README.

factory_girl

A bunch of fun commits to factory_girl this week. Chris Griego (cgriego) used pull requests as a forum to promote his ActiveAttr gem (81c9f2c and 4e2a672). Joshua Clayton (joshuaclayton) added a before_create callback (24d417d).

Vasiliy Ermolovich (nashby) used ActiveSupport for deprecation warnings (bca13f1 and 28e3c25) and also made use of the singleton_class method in Ruby 1.9 (08d01c1).

Mike Subelsky (subelsky) fixed a typo in the docs around the name FactoryGirl::Syntax::Methods (266b1d6), Dan Croak (croaky) mentioned the supported Ruby versions in the README (bed50ec), Josh renamed Changelog to NEWS because that’s exactly what it is (4f5b775) and also renamed *rb files to *erb to handle yardoc better (a6ccbcb).

capybara-webkit

I totally dropped the ball on releasing a new version of capybara-webkit this week. Sorry about that! Joe Ferris (jferris), however, refactored some of the C++, which is very welcome (c2a2bd0 and 4531f65).

appraisal

Some news in our appraisal gem this week: Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) added a contribution guideline (fd05fdf), then osheroff fixed appraisal to handle weird filenames (1d4fa93, b21220a, and 75a4970).