I'm not sure I prefer that for specs, though, because I've gotten used to always being able to run my specs as 'ruby my_spec.rb' – no rake, no script/spec, no spec command. This works well for e.g. Emacs “run this file” keybindings – it means the editor doesn't need to any special sniffing the file to determine what command to run the file with.

I've long wished the Ruby interpreter would just normalize and absolutize all require-d filenames before loading them.

require 'spec_helper'

And then modify the load path to contain the load path to contain the spec or test directory.

This is a practice Rails adopted at one point. In addition to simplifying the require in your specs, it also prevents spec_helper.rb from being required multiple times.

Imagine two specs, spec/foo_spec.rb and spec/bar/baz_spec.rb. foo_spec would end up requiring 'spec_helper.rb' and bar/baz_spec.rb would end up requiring baz/../spec_helper.rb

Normally, ruby only requires a file once… but, it's not smart enough to understand that spec_helper and baz/../spec_helper.rb. The result is that it gets required multiple times. This mostly is a problem if you define constants (you'll see warnings about constant already defined) or if you include/extend modules that do something with their callbacks (rr causes a system stack too deep if you include its module more than once).

I'm not sure I prefer that for specs, though, because I've gotten used to always being able to run my specs as 'ruby my_spec.rb' – no rake, no script/spec, no spec command. This works well for e.g. Emacs “run this file” keybindings – it means the editor doesn't need to any special sniffing the file to determine what command to run the file with.

I've long wished the Ruby interpreter would just normalize and absolutize all require-d filenames before loading them.

require 'spec_helper'

And then modify the load path to contain the load path to contain the spec or test directory.

This is a practice Rails adopted at one point. In addition to simplifying the require in your specs, it also prevents spec_helper.rb from being required multiple times.

Imagine two specs, spec/foo_spec.rb and spec/bar/baz_spec.rb. foo_spec would end up requiring 'spec_helper.rb' and bar/baz_spec.rb would end up requiring baz/../spec_helper.rb

Normally, ruby only requires a file once… but, it's not smart enough to understand that spec_helper and baz/../spec_helper.rb. The result is that it gets required multiple times. This mostly is a problem if you define constants (you'll see warnings about constant already defined) or if you include/extend modules that do something with their callbacks (rr causes a system stack too deep if you include its module more than once).


require 'simple_require'
# this library would encapsulates the pathname stuff, ascend, etc. so we could then do this:
simple_require('spec_helper', 'some_other_file')