Fast Specs!

Nothing sucks the joy out of writing your Rails app like having an incredibly slow test suite. Even running one file with a single spec on my new MacBookPro takes almost five seconds!

% time rspec spec/models/publish_spec.rb
.

Finished in 4.48 seconds
1 example, 0 failures

real    0m4.592s
user    0m3.990s
sys     0m0.536s

Wait, maybe we can just run ruby?

% time ruby -Ispec spec/models/publish_spec.rb
.

Finished in 0.71331 seconds
1 example, 0 failures

real    0m4.468s
user    0m3.953s
sys     0m0.512s

Five.

Seconds.

F I V E SECONDS.

One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi, Four Mississippi, Five Mississippi.

An eternity.

Let’s take a look at the admittedly ridiculous and contrived spec:

it "publishes the item to the syndicate" do
  syndicate = double()
  syndicate.should_receive(:publish).with(item)
  item.publish_to(syndicate)
end

Maybe there is a sleep hiding inside #publish_to?

def publish_to(syndicate)
  syndicate.publish(self)
end

Nope.

Very little of the time spent has to do with either the code under test, or the testing code. The majority of the time is just getting the test to run.

The source of most of this is the default spec_helper.rb that RSpec generates to load up our test environment.

Asking around about this on Twitter (you should follow me @leshill :) yielded no examples on how you might write your specs to get some of that time back. So I wrote the fast_specs app (it is available on github) to demonstrate how to make your own specs faster.

Writing Fast Specs

The fast_specs app has two spec suites, one a normal RSpec suite that can be invoked as a whole with:

% rake spec

Or invoked with individual specs with:

% rspec spec/models/publish_spec.rb
% ruby -Ispec spec/models/publish_spec.rb

And a Fast Spec suite that can be invoked as a whole with:

% rake fast

Or invoked with individual specs with:

% rspec -Ifast_specs fast_specs/models/publish_spec.rb

In order to use the Fast Spec suite, we put our fast specs under fast_specs much like we do with normal RSpec specs. For example, the spec for the Publish model would be located at fast_specs/models/publish_spec.rb.

At the top of our simple spec, with no changes to the implementation or the contents of the describe block, we require the fast_spec_helper, and the Publish model:

require 'fast_spec_helper'

app_require 'app/models/publish'

fast_spec_helper adds a tiny bit of sugar by providing app_require which just wraps loading files from your app.

Now when we run it:

% time rspec -Ifast_specs fast_specs/models/publish_spec.rb
  .

  real    0m0.249s
  user    0m0.183s
  sys     0m0.064s

  Finished in 0.17153 seconds
  1 example, 0 failures

One quarter of a second.

Oh point two five seconds.

Much faster.

GO! FAST FASTER FASTEST GO!

Give me some support

Sometimes our code has some coupling to other parts of the system, and in those cases, we can just require the parts that we need during our spec. For example, if our Post depends on Publish our requires would look like:

require 'fast_spec_helper'

app_require 'app/models/publish'
app_require 'app/models/post'

Not all specs are written completely with mocks (although more should be), and sometimes we need additional setup. For example, lets say that we are moving an existing classic TDD model spec (again, completely contrived) for our Post that looks like this:

it "creates a post" do
  expect do
    Post.create(title: 'a title', body: 'some body text')
  end.to change(Post, :count).from(0).to(1)
end

This spec requires accessing the database and ensuring some sort of transactional fixture support. We can write these support files, place them in them in fast_specs/support and then require them using another tiny bit of sugar with support_require to load our support files:

require 'fast_spec_helper'

support_require 'database'
support_require 'database_cleaner'

app_require 'app/models/publish'
app_require 'app/models/post'

Timing this spec (which is using a transaction on the database) yields:

% time rspec -Ifast_specs fast_specs/models/post_spec.rb
.

Finished in 0.80608 seconds
1 example, 0 failures

real    0m0.890s
user    0m0.701s
sys     0m0.170s

Not bad. And most definitely faster than our previous isolated spec was :)

Make this better!

This is only the beginning of making your specs faster. Yes, shaving 4 seconds off when running an individual spec is fantastic. If you have suggestions for more techniques or code that helps even further, make a pull request!

Thanks

The approach outlined here is something that I just made up out of sheer frustration with the ridiculousness of waiting 5 seconds for a simple spec.

The idea of replacing the spec_helper.rb was first mentioned to me by Gary Bernhardt over dinner a while back. Corey Haines has also been advocating this approach in some of his talks (and which I would love to see one of these days :)

And I know there was a blog post that suggested some serious stubbing for ActionController a while back (I cannot find it now, if you know it, please ping me.)