Tapout with Minitest 4

Tapout with Minitest 4

First, install the Minitest TAP-Y/J plugin, Minitap. Be sure to install version 0.4.x, which is designed to work with Minitest 4 series. In addition to minitap this will install tapout, ansi and json gems.

$ gem install minitap -v 0.4.1

Or, of course, add it to your Gemfile.

gem "minitap", "~> 0.4"

Second, add this bit of code to your test helper script:

    require 'minitap'
    MiniTest::Unit.runner = MiniTest::TapY.new

Now when you run your tests, TAP-Y will be the output. If you want to make the output selectable, one way to do it is to wrap the above in an environment variable condition, e.g.

    if ENV['rpt'] != 'default'
      require 'minitap'
      MiniTest::Unit.runner = MiniTest::TapY.new
    end

Now the fun part. To get any one of the cool tapout report formats, simply pipe the output to the tapout command line tool with the report format name as an argument.

$ ruby test/example_test.rb | tapout progress

If you don't supply a report format name, the traditional dot reporter will be used. Use tapout --help to get a list of available report formats.

Using Minitap 4 with Rake

You can use tapout with Rake's test task as well, just be sure to use the -q option to remove extraneous output.

$ rake -q test | tapout

Of course you probably want to pass the output to tapout automatically. Thankfully Rake's test task allows us to append to the command that runs the test using TESTOPTS environment variable.

$ TESTOPTS="| tapout" rake -q test

Or in the task's definition itself using the options setting:

    Rake::TestTask.new do |t|
      t.libs << "test"
      t.test_files = FileList['test/test*.rb']
      t.verbose = false
      t.options = "| tapout"
    end