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Thomas Ruggeri
Thomas Ruggeri

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Rspec or Minitest for testing Rails apps

#discuss #rails #ruby #testing

I've been using Rspec extensively at work for a large Rails application, but have been using Minitest on my pet projects. I like both, and can see pros and cons of each.

I'd like to know what others in the community use, what they prefer and why.

Top comments (7)

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vinistock profile image
Vinicius Stock •

Here are some of my opinions about both frameworks.

Rspec

Pros

  • Test are very easy to read and figure out what they are trying to verify
  • CLI is simple. You can easily run a specific example (even if the example is defined using metaprogramming)
  • The tools for stubbing and verifying method calls are simple and intuitive
  • Creating a matrix of different scenarios is easy through shared contexts, lets and the example hooks (before, after, around)

Cons

  • Takes longer to learn the DSL since it is not pure Ruby
  • Tests take longer and have a larger memory footprint
  • Requires libraries for doing things that come out of the box with minitest (such as fixtures)

Minitest

Pros

  • Runs much faster than rspec
  • Tests are written in pure Ruby
  • Outputs not only number of examples, but also number of assertions
  • Comes with fixtures and many Rails assertions out of the box

Cons

  • CLI isn't the best. Hard to run a specific example
  • Stubbing or verifying method calls is not as intuitive as in rspec
  • Harder to create a matrix of scenarios since you cannot nest contexts as in rspec
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truggeri profile image
Thomas Ruggeri •

I totally agree about the matrix of scenarios. I'm still not satisfied with contexts in Rspec because of the nested nature. This is somewhat mitigated by shared examples, but still.

Excellent comparison list!

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johncip profile image
jmc • • Edited

FWIW, there are shared contexts too, as you probably know. I'd sometimes make a regular loop outside of the context in order to repeat tests over some values. And helper functions are often handy, and multiline lets.

Beyond that, IME you just get to a point where they're dry enough and let it go. Since they're tests, they're not likely to need much maintenance, and what they do is often repetitive by nature.

Overall, I like the RSpec DSL... my main gripe was that there are two versions of it, so it's possible for a codebase to have a mix of styles. Probably not an issue for projects started after version 3 came out, though.

I haven't used minitest much, but I will say that I'm not a huge fan of structuring tests as classes (a la their "unit test" style, or Python's built-in unittest, or the various xUnit frameworks).

Running tests by line number is a nice feature of RSpec's but I've tended to use the substring filter more anyway, and it looks like minitest has one. (Often the line number changes as you make changes to the file.) Had I not been running my Ruby app inside a VM, I'd probably have made more use of editor integration there anyway.

Also it's hard to overstate the importance of faster test runs :p

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rhymes profile image
rhymes •

In my heart I'm still a fan of minitest's simplicity. RSpec's DSL is powerful but it can be... too much.

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melezhik profile image
Alexey Melezhik •

Hi ! You can try Tomty - generic testing framework. You could write tests on many languages including Ruby if you really into Ruby influenced testing ...

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coreyja profile image
Corey Alexander •

I've only used rspec really

Since you've used both, what do you like about minitest?

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truggeri profile image
Thomas Ruggeri •

Good question. Some things I like about minitest,

  • It takes very few lines of code to write some simple tests. Many of the tests that I've been writing are only a few lines long and very clear on their intention.
  • Unlike Rspec, it doesn't have an opinionated view on the way the tests should be written. When getting started with Rspec, it feels very foreign because of the testing DSL they created. Minitest doesn't take nearly as much to get started with.
  • I don't need to refer to the documentation nearly as often as I do with Rspec. I don't know if that's because I haven't done enough with Minitest yet ;).

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