Test your plugins!

Test are supposed to be run often, but they only get run if they’re easy to run. When you create a plugin in your Ruby on Rails project, it doens’t get run by default.

And that’s not very easy now, is it? Fortunately there is a standard task to run the plugin tests, which is called `test_plugins’. How do we get this task to run all the time?

RoR allows us to specify our own tasks in /lib/tasks, so we’re going to add a file called `test_plugins_by_default.rake’ to this directory, and we put the following in the file:

desc "Run test:plugins by default."
task :default do
  namespace 'test' do
    Rake::Task[:plugins].invoke
  end
end

Very well sir, but why does this work? The Rake User Guide tells us that a task that is declared multiple times, cumulatively adds it’s actions to the task. So ‘test_plugins’ will now be run in the default task.