a timocracy of one

Yesterday I wrote a post on capturing the output of rake from a ruby call using backticks, because I wanted to do so in a test. Well, I had Date.today stubbed out, but got lazy and used yesterday’s date, so of course when I come in today the test fails. In the light of a new day my problem was obvious. If you call rake from a sub-shell, say via ``, of course your mocking will not exist in that process. So today, I had Another Wonderful Opportunity for Learning (there are acronyms for this that use a different word than wonderful): a chance to do it right.

It took a little digging to figure out how to get this to work right with the built-in rails tasks, so here you go:

require 'rake'
require 'rake/rdoctask'
require 'rake/testtask'
require 'tasks/rails'

def capture_stdout
  s = StringIO.new
  oldstdout = $stdout
  $stdout = s
  yield
  s.string
ensure
  $stdout = oldstdout
end

Rake.application.rake_require '../../lib/tasks/metric_fetcher'
results = capture_stdout {Rake.application['metric_fetcher'].invoke}

I liberated capture_stdout from the rake tests themselves. In retrospect, I should have just looked there first. As TDD and especially BDD get even more widespread the tests are often the easiest place to look for good examples of usage.

As you may know system() and `` both make system calls in ruby, but the second one captures the STDOUT for you, essentially, which is handy sometimes, like when testing. They don’t necessarily both do this by just a straight call to the commandline, but various internal utilities that make such thing possible in Windows too, for instance.

Well the problem with this is it can mess with your setting of an ENV as a precursor to your command. For instance, this is valid on my platform:

RAILS_ENV=test rake metric_fetcher

and works via system():

system("RAILS_ENV=test rake metric_fetcher")

but chokes in backticks, probably due to the aforementioned jiggering around for Windows compat:

`RAILS_ENV=test rake metric_fetcher`

Now you generally can just move the command back to the beginning of the line:

`rake RAILS_ENV=test metric_fetcher`

but if for some bizarre reason that doesn’t work for you (it’s probably something else going, wrong, though, to be honest) you can do this:

ENV['RAILS_ENV']='test'; `rake metric_fetcher`

So ultimately, I can do this hacky wonder:

assert `rake RAILS_ENV=test metric_fetcher`.empty?

if my rake task succeeds silently and fails noisily (which is a useful characteristic for cron’ed tasks).

Thanks to Defiler and ocotpod for proving to me I really did have my head up my ass and that all but the leading env var in backticks form should work as expected.(fixture set-up issues as usual).

Addendum And if you are calling rake like this in a test and getting odd problems – consider turning transaction fixtures off.