Generally speaking, you only need to clone the project and install the dependencies with Bundler. You can either get a full RSpec development environment using rspec-dev or you can set this project up individually.
For most contributors, setting up the project individually will be simpler. Unless you have a specific reason to use rspec-dev, we recommend using this approach.
Clone the repo:
$ git clone [email protected]:rspec/rspec-rails.git
Install the dependencies using Bundler:
$ cd rspec-rails
$ bundle install
To minimize boot time and to ensure we don't depend upon any extra dependencies
loaded by Bundler, our CI builds avoid loading Bundler at runtime
by using Bundler's --standalone option
.
While not strictly necessary (many/most of our contributors do not do this!),
if you want to exactly reproduce our CI builds you'll want to do the same:
$ bundle install --standalone --binstubs
The --binstubs
option creates the bin/rspec
file that, like bundle exec rspec
, will load
all the versions specified in Gemfile.lock
without loading bundler at runtime!
See the rspec-dev README for setup instructions.
The rspec-dev project contains many rake tasks for helping manage an RSpec development environment, making it easy to do things like:
- Change branches across all repos
- Update all repos with the latest code from
main
- Cut a new release across all repos
- Push out updated build scripts to all repos
These sorts of tasks are essential for the RSpec maintainers but will probably be unnecessary complexity if you're just contributing to one repository. If you are getting setup to make your first contribution, we recommend you take the simpler route of setting up rspec-rails individually.
The Gemfile is designed to be flexible and support using
the other RSpec repositories either from a local sibling directory
(e.g. ../rspec-<subproject>
) or, if there is no such directory,
directly from git. This generally does the "right thing", but can
be a gotcha in some situations. For example, if you are setting up
rspec-core
, and you happen to have an old clone of rspec-expectations
in a sibling directory, it'll be used even though it might be months or
years out of date, which can cause confusing failures.
To avoid this problem, you can either export USE_GIT_REPOS=1
to force
the use of :git
dependencies instead of local dependencies, or update
the code in the sibling directory. rspec-dev contains rake tasks to
help you keep all repos in sync.
If you need additional gems for any tasks---such as benchmark-ips
for benchmarking
or byebug
for debugging---you can create a Gemfile-custom
file containing those
gem declarations. The Gemfile
evaluates that file if it exists, and it is git-ignored.
The CI build runs many verification steps to prevent regressions and ensure high-quality code. To run the build locally, run:
$ script/run_build
See build detail for more detail.
To ensure high, uniform code quality, all code changes (including changes from the maintainers!) are subject to a pull request code review. We'll often ask for clarification or suggest alternate ways to do things. Our code reviews are intended to be a two-way conversation.
Here's a short, non-exhaustive checklist of things we typically ask contributors to do before PRs are ready to merge. It can help get your PR merged faster if you do these in advance!
- New behavior is covered by tests and all tests are passing.
- No Ruby warnings are issued by your changes.
- Documentation reflects changes and renders as intended.
- Rubocop passes (e.g.
bundle exec rubocop
). - Commits are squashed into a reasonable number of logical changesets that tell an easy-to-follow story.
- No changelog entry is necessary (we'll add it as part of the merge process!)
RSpec uses YARD for its API documentation. To ensure the docs render well, we recommend running a YARD server and viewing your edits in a browser.
To run a YARD server:
$ bundle exec yard server --reload
# or, if you installed your bundle with `--standalone --binstubs`:
$ bin/yard server --reload
Then navigate to localhost:8808
to view the rendered docs.
In the other documented rspec gems, we use a rake command in rspec-dev
to generate documentation for rspec.info.
As rspec-rails
is no longer sync with the other gems in terms of versioning
since rspec-rails
4, if you want to publish updated documentation you will
need to run the rake task from this repository.
- First clone the
rspec.github.io
repository into a sibling folder.
cd .. && git clone https://github.com/rspec/rspec.github.io && cd rspec.github.io
- Check out the source branch
git checkout source
- Install the template gem that will be needed as yard plugin: rspec-docs-template.
gem build yard-rspec-docs-template.gemspec
- Change back to the
rspec-rails
directory
cd ../rspec-rails
- Generate the docs for the version you want, ensuring you are on the appropriate (released) commit.
bundle exec rake "update_docs[4.0, 4-0-maintenance]