When I’m getting back into a project after not working on it for a while, I just want to know whether the application works. I want to know whether it will run on my development environment, even if I’m on a new machine. I have three computers that I use at various locations so this is important to me.

So for me the simplest possible test would be:

• The home page should load. That is the default route should return a successful page without any errors. It will have some key piece of text that says it’s working.

Here’s how I do it with cucumber:

If you haven’t installed the cucumber gems yet, put this in your config/test.rbfile.

If you haven’t cucumber set up yet, run

script/generate cucumber

Then, create the file below:

File: features/homepage.feature

Feature: View homepage for app
  In order to make sure the app loads
  As a user
  I want to see the home page

Scenario: Homepage should say Search
  When I go to the homepage
  Then I should see "Search"

Tip: none of what you write in the Feature section really matters. It’s just for you or your client’s benefit.

Then, run

cucumber features

You should get the following output:

:> cucumber features
Feature: View homepage for app
  In order to make sure the app loads
  As a user
  I want to see the home page

  Scenario: Homepage should say Search # features/homepage.feature:6
    When I go to the homepage          # features/step_definitions/webrat_steps.rb:10
    Then I should see "My Telltale Text" # features/step_definitions/webrat_steps.rb:118

1 scenario (1 passed)
2 steps (2 passed)

Some cool things about this: “the homepage” is something that cucumber / webrat understands out of the box. See features/step_definitions/webrat_steps.rb for how to define other custom route names. And also, “I should see “something in quotes” is out of the box cucumber goodness.

This code can be used to manage a reseller account on a web host that uses the WHM/Cpanel system. It can install new accounts, suspend/unsuspend accounts and other methods

Currently it is unfinished and I am looking for some help to implement all the functions.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# note above line may need to be changed on linux - use 'which ruby' to find path to ruby
# by Ivan Storck 13 February 2008
puts "The current directory is #{ENV["PWD"]}"
puts "About to delete ALL subversion info from this directory and all directories below"
print "WARNING - this is permanent! Type YES to continue:"
confirm = gets
if confirm == "YES\n" or confirm == nil
  puts `find . -name .svn -type d -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf`
  puts "Deleted all subversion info"
else
  puts "Command aborted"
end

I put this in a file called stripsvn in a folder called bash_scripts (I know, it’s not written in bash, it’s in ruby) – that was in my path from the command line so I could just type stripsvn at the terminal and run the command. You could put it anywhere, but it’s useful to have a folder that you put scripts you’ve wrote in, and have it included in your path. You might also have to chmod 755 stripsvn to make it executable. This short script is a good example of using mostly ruby to write a useful shell script and only use bash or what I’d call “unix” commands when you have to. It’s all ruby except for the line with the find that actually does the deleting.

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