Better tests reporters for Rails 7

Tests reporters help us to increase the readability of our whole test suite. Let's see how to improve the default one.

Default CLI test reporters with Rails

Maybe this is matter of personal taste here, but I find the default test reporter in Ruby to be a little bit rough :

bin/rails test:all
Running 34 tests in a single process (parallelization threshold is 50)
Run options: --seed 27591

# Running:

............Rack::Handler is deprecated and replaced by Rackup::Handler
Capybara starting Puma...
* Version 6.4.2 , codename: The Eagle of Durango
* Min threads: 0, max threads: 4
* Listening on http://127.0.0.1:32903
......................

Finished in 12.990000s, 2.6174 runs/s, 4.6959 assertions/s.
34 runs, 61 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

Ok, I have one warning, some logs from a webserver, some random green points, and a few stats.

Not bad, but could be better.

Prerequisites for this tutorial

ruby -v  # 3.3.0
rails -v  # 7.1.3
bundle -v  # 2.4.10
node -v # 20.9.0
git --version # 2.34.1

Build a simple Rails app

Ok we take the most simple use case, so let's use Boring Rails™ here

rails new myapp
cd myapp 
bin/rails db:create db:migrate

Build a default test suite

There's no surprise, I'm big fond of @lazaronixon work about authentication-zero gem, where you have an excellent laying ground to build a custom authentication system by yourself.

And guess what, there's a full test suite (with system, integration, and unit tests) offered 🎁.

Perfect for our case!

bundle add authentication-zero
bin/rails generate authentication
bin/rails db:create db:migrate

So we just run the full test suite, as per the docs

bin/rails test:all -v

Notice the -v option to see a more verbose version. {: .prompt-info }

Here is an excerpt of the output :

SessionsControllerTest#test_should_get_new = 0.00 s = .
SessionsControllerTest#test_should_sign_out = 0.27 s = .
SessionsControllerTest#test_should_sign_in = 0.26 s = .
SessionsControllerTest#test_should_not_sign_in_with_wrong_credentials = 0.26 s = .
Identity::PasswordResetsTest#test_updating_password = 0.26 s = .
Identity::PasswordResetsTest#test_sending_a_password_reset_email = 0.32 s = .

Finished in 11.980820s, 2.8379 runs/s, 5.0915 assertions/s.
34 runs, 61 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

It's more readable than first version, but it's still far away from what Jest has to offer in the JS world.

Add a better reporter for Minitest

Add this to your Gemfile :

gem 'minitest-reporters', group: [:test]

And run

bundle install

And add this to test-helper.rb, just above class ActiveSupport::TestCase :

require "minitest/reporters"
Minitest::Reporters.use! Minitest::Reporters::SpecReporter.new

Now run again

bin/rails test:all

(without the verbose option)

Which gives the following output (excerpt) :

UserMailerTest
  test_password_reset                                             PASS (0.00s)
  test_email_verification                                         PASS (0.00s)

SessionsControllerTest
  test_should_get_index                                           PASS (0.26s)
  test_should_get_new                                             PASS (0.00s)
  test_should_sign_in                                             PASS (0.26s)
  test_should_sign_out                                            PASS (0.26s)
  test_should_not_sign_in_with_wrong_credentials                  PASS (0.25s)

Finished in 11.94632s
34 tests, 61 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

Far better! Now we know how is the test suite organized.

I personnally feel much better this way 😊 Your tastes may vary of course.

Summary

Now we know how to install a full set of test examples with Rails, and how change the way the report is displayed in the CLI.

That was a quick and easy tutorial. We now run any kind of test locally with a more readable report, with only 3 lines of code.

Enjoy!

David.