How to test a script that generates files

Question

I am creating a Rubygem that will let me generate jekyll post files. One of the reasons I am developing this project is to learn TDD. This gem is strictly functional on the command line, and it has to make a series of checks to make sure that it finds the _posts directory. This depends on two things:

1. Wether or not a location option was passed
   • Is that location option valid?
2. A location option was not passed
   • Is the posts dir in the current directory?
   • Is the posts dir the current working directory?

At that point, I am really having a hard time testing that part of the application. So I have two questions:

• is it acceptable/okay to skip tests for small parts of the application like the one described above?
• If not, how do you test file manipulation in ruby using minitest?

Answer 1

Some projects I've seen implement their command line tools as Command objects (for example: Rubygems and my linebreak gem). These objects are initialized with the ARGV simply have a call or execute method which then starts the whole process. This enables these projects to put their command line applications into a virtual environment. They could, for example hold the input and output stream objects in instance variables of the command object to make the application independant of using STDOUT/STDIN. And thus, making it possible to test the input/output of the command line application. In the same way I imagine, you could hold your current working directory in an instance variable to make your command line application independent of your real working directory. You could then create a temporary directory for each test and set this one as the working directory for your Command object.

And now some code:

require 'pathname'

class MyCommand
  attr_accessor :input, :output, :error, :working_dir

  def initialize(options = {})
    @input = options[:input] ? options[:input] : STDIN
    @output = options[:output] ? options[:output] : STDOUT
    @error = options[:error] ? options[:error] : STDERR
    @working_dir = options[:working_dir] ? Pathname.new(options[:working_dir]) : Pathname.pwd
  end

  # Override the puts method to use the specified output stream
  def puts(output = nil)
    @output.puts(output)
  end

  def execute(arguments = ARGV)
    # Change to the given working directory
    Dir.chdir(working_dir) do
      # Analyze the arguments
      if arguments[0] == '--readfile'
        posts_dir = Pathname.new('posts')
        my_file = posts_dir + 'myfile'
        puts my_file.read
      end
    end
  end
end

# Start the command without mockups if the ruby script is called directly
if __FILE__ == $PROGRAM_NAME
  MyCommand.new.execute
end

Now in your test's setup and teardown methods you could do:

require 'pathname'
require 'tmpdir'
require 'stringio'

def setup
  @working_dir = Pathname.new(Dir.mktmpdir('mycommand'))
  @output = StringIO.new
  @error = StringIO.new

  @command = MyCommand.new(:working_dir => @working_dir, :output => @output, :error => @error)
end

def test_some_stuff
  @command.execute(['--readfile'])

  # ...
end

def teardown
  @working_dir.rmtree
end

(In the example I'm using Pathname, which is a really nice object oriented file system API from Ruby's standard library and StringIO, which is useful for for mocking STDOUT as it's an IO object which streams into a simple String)

In the acutal test you could now use the @working_dir variable to test for existence or content of files:

path = @working_dir + 'posts' + 'myfile'
path.exist?
path.file?
path.directory?
path.read == "abc\n"

Answer 2

From my experience (and thus this is VERY subjective), I think it's ok sometimes to skip unit testing in some areas which are difficult to test. You need to find out what you get in return and the cost for testing or not. My rule of thumb is that the decision to not test a class should be very unusual (around less than 1 in 300 classes)

If what you're trying to test is very difficult, because of the dependencies with the file system, I think you could try to extract all the bits that interact with the file system.