When doing test driven development I really like having continuous feedback. Does the code compile, is all the functionality still intact or what errors are there?
I could of course jump between terminal windows and manually execute the tests but that is not a very good use of my time. It needs to happen automatically and so far I have solved this with inotifywait.
$ inotifywait -mre modify src | while read LINE; do runghc $LINE; done
That command watches the src/ directory for changes and executes runghc on the changed files.
What I would do is open up a tmux pane, next to my Vim pane, where I would run inotifywait. That way, whenever I saved a file in Vim the script would run and I could immediately see if the code was any good.
Enter Guard
It turns out there is a better way than to muck about with bash scripts. A project called Guard does exactly this, but in a more controlled and reusable manner.
As with most new, cool software, Guard is written in Ruby and distributed as a gem. Thus installation is very easy; gem install guard should get you everything you need.
Once installed you need to set up a Guardfile to hold your configuration. In this file you describe what to watch and what actions to take when files are changed. The many Guard plugins will help with this but most of them are geared toward Ruby projects in general and Rails one specifically.
Converting my above Haskell tester above, using the shell plugin, would look something like this.
guard :shell do
watch(%r{^src/.+}) do |m|
`runghc #{m[0]}`
end
end
If you are using Symfony or any other PHP framework, there is a PHPUnit Guard plugin you can use to automatically run your PHPUnit test suites.
More than testing
Guard’s usefulness does not stop at automating tests however. I am currently using it to write this blog post, where I have set it up to regenerate my Jekyll site whenever a file is changed.
You could also compile SASS/LESS code into CSS, CoffeeScript into JavaScript or whatever other automation you can think of.
Guard is a really nice general-purpose development tool. Do yourself a favor and check it out today!