Are we abusing at_exit?

If you are deeply interested in Ruby, you probably already know about Kernel#at_exit . You might even use it daily, without knowing that it is there, in many gems, solving many problems. Maybe even too many?

Basics

Let me remind you some basic facts about at_exit . You can skip this section if you are already familiar with it.

puts "start" at_exit do puts "inside at_exit" end puts "end"

The output of such little script is:

start end inside at_exit

Yeah. Obviously. You did not come to read what you can read in the documentation. So let’s go further.

Intermediate

at_exit and exit codes

In ruby you can terminate a script in multiple ways. But what matters most at the for other programms is the exit status code. And at_exit block can change it.

puts "start" at_exit do puts "inside at_exit" exit 7 end puts "end" exit 0

Let’s see it in action.

> ruby exiting.rb; echo $? start end inside at_exit 7

But exit code might get changed in implicit way due to an exception:

at_exit do raise "surprise, exception happend inside at_exit" end

Output:

> ruby exiting.rb; echo $? exiting.rb:2:in `block in <main>': surprise, exception happend inside at_exit (RuntimeError) 1

But there is a catch. It will not change if the exit code was already set:

at_exit do raise "surprise, exception happend inside at_exit" end exit 0

See for yourself:

> ruby exiting.rb; echo $? exiting.rb:2:in `block in <main>': surprise, exception happend inside at_exit (RuntimeError) 0

But wait, there is even more:

at_exit handlers order

The documentation says: If multiple handlers are registered, they are executed in reverse order of registration.

So, can you predict the result of the following code?

puts "start" at_exit do puts "start of first at_exit" at_exit { puts "nested inside first at_exit" } at_exit { puts "another one nested inside first at_exit" } puts "end of first at_exit" end at_exit do puts "start of second at_exit" at_exit { puts "nested inside second at_exit" } at_exit { puts "another one nested inside second at_exit" } puts "end of second at_exit" end puts "end"

Here is my output:

start end start of second at_exit end of second at_exit another one nested inside second at_exit nested inside second at_exit start of first at_exit end of first at_exit another one nested inside first at_exit nested inside first at_exit

So it is more like stack-based behaviour. There were even few bugs when this behavior changed and things broke:

Which brings us to minitest

minitest

One of the best known example of using at_exit is minitest . Note: My little examples are using minitest-5.0.5 installed from rubygems.

Here is a simple minitest file:

# test.rb gem "minitest" require "minitest/autorun" class TestStruct < Minitest :: Test def test_struct assert_equal "chillout" , Struct . new ( :name ). new ( "chillout" ). name end end

You can run it with ruby test.rb . As easy as that. But here is the question: How can minitest run our test if the test is defined after we require minitest ? You probably already know the answer:

You can see that rspec is also using at_exit

Minitest at_exit usage is a little complicated:

# Registers Minitest to run at process exit def self . autorun at_exit { next if $! and not $! . kind_of? SystemExit exit_code = nil at_exit { @@after_run . reverse_each ( & :call ) exit exit_code || false } exit_code = Minitest . run ARGV } unless @@installed_at_exit @@installed_at_exit = true end # A simple hook allowing you to run a block of code after everything # is done running. Eg: # # Minitest.after_run { p $debugging_info } def self . after_run & block @@after_run << block end

But why does it need to use at_exit hook at all? Is it not some kind of hack? Don’t know about you, but it certainly feels a little hackish to me. Let’s see what we can do without at_exit ?

gem "minitest" require "minitest" class TestStruct < Minitest :: Test def test_struct assert_equal "chillout" , Struct . new ( :name ). new ( "chillout" ). name end end # Need to override it to do nothing # because pride_plugin is loading # minitest/autorun anyway: # https://github.com/seattlerb/minitest/blob/f771b23367dc698586f1e794eae83bcb905fa0d8/lib/minitest/pride_plugin.rb#L1 def Minitest . autorun end Minitest . run

It works:

> ruby test.rb Run options: --seed 63193 # Running: . Finished in 0.000675s, 1481.4332 runs/s, 1481.4332 assertions/s. 1 runs, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skip

So we can imagine that if the mentioned issue was not a problem, we could trigger running specs at the end of file with one line and avoid using at_exit . But if we want to run tests from multiple files situation gets more complicated. You can solve it with a little helper:

gem "minitest" require "minitest" require "./test1" require "./test2" def Minitest . autorun end Minitest . run

But then you need to keep Minitest.run out of your test files (to avoid running it multiple times), which make it impossible for us, to run tests from a single file, using the old syntax that we are used to: ruby single_file_test.rb .

We could dynamically require needed files in our script based on its arguments like ruby helper.rb -- test.rb test2.rb . So with time we are getting closer to building our own binary for running the tests.

Minitest binary

And I think that is what minitest is currently missing. Binary for running tests that would let you specify where they are. The only difference would be that we would have to run our tests using minitest file_test.rb instead of ruby file_test.rb . Because the shipped binary would be starting and ending point for our programs we would not have to use at_exit for triggering our tests. After all it sounds way more logical to say program do something with file A by typing program a.rb instead of saying Ruby run file A and when you are finished do something completelly different that is actually the main thing that I wanted to achieve. I hope you agree.

We are starting our Rails apps with rails command or unicorn command or rackup command (or whatever webserver you use ;) ). We do not start them by typing ruby config/environment.rb and running the web server in at_exit hook. So by analogy minitest file_test.rb sounds natural to me.

Capybara

But minitest is not the only one doing interesting things in at_exit hook. Another very common example is capybara . Capybara is using at_exit hook to close a browser such as Firefox, when tests are finished. As you can see there is quite complicated logic around it:

def browser unless @browser @browser = Selenium :: WebDriver . for ( options [ :browser ], options . reject { | key , val | SPECIAL_OPTIONS . include? ( key ) }) main = Process . pid at_exit do # Store the exit status of the test run since it goes away after calling the at_exit proc... @exit_status = $! . status if $! . is_a? ( SystemExit ) quit if Process . pid == main exit @exit_status if @exit_status # Force exit with stored status end end @browser end

What could capybara do to avoid using at_exit directly? Perhaps a better way would be to keep this kind of code dependent on test suite used underneath and specify the hook via different gems such as capybara-minitest , capybara-rspec etc. It is now possible in some major frameworks:

in minitest you can use Minitest.after_run . currently it uses at_exit but you do not need to worry if they ever decide to change the internal implementation to simply execute it manually at the end of minitest binary. And it states your intention more explicitly.

you can use . currently it uses but you do not need to worry if they ever decide to change the internal implementation to simply execute it manually at the end of binary. And it states your intention more explicitly. in rspec you can use after(:suite)

you can use cucumber unfortunatelly recommends using at_exit directly

Of course at_exit is more universal, and capybara might be used outside of testing environment. In such case I would simply leave the task of closing the browser to the programmer.

Sinatra

Sinatra is using at_exit hook to run itself (the application).

Conclusion

I think it would be best if every long running and commonly used process such as web servers or test frameworks provide there own binary and custom hooks for executing code at the end of a program. That way we could all forget about at_exit and live happily ever after. We were considering at_exit usage for our chillout gem to ensure that statistics collected during last requests just before the webserver is stopped are also happily delivered to our backend. Although we are still not sure if we want to go that way.

Appendix

So much words said and I still gave you no reason for avoiding at_exit right? Well it seems that every project using this feature is sooner or later being hit by bugs related to its behavor and tries to find workarounds.

Kudos