A lot of ink has been spilled over how to get “real” unit tests working in Ruby on Rails projects. The first time I encountered it was when Gary Bernhardt and Corey Haines started the “fast specs” meme. Knowing both of them, it was partially about improving runtime speed for faster feedback, but it was also about gaining focus and simplicity by way of excluding the myriad global constants that come along with require "rails" .

Because RSpec has always shipped with is own (quite nice!) CLI, setting up a test suite that didn’t load rails was as simple as creating a one-off helper file and cordoning off a directory for rails-free tests (e.g. rspec spec/fast ). For Minitest users running their tests with a Rake task, a few more steps were needed, but it was still pretty straightforward.

But then, after the “movement” died down, Rails 4 arrived and a change to how it configured Rake inadvertently made it really hard to run rake without first requiring the universe. In a Rails 4 app, the generated Rakefile looks like this:

require File . expand_path( '../config/application' , __FILE__) Rails . application . load_tasks

So, in the post-Rails 4 world, if you’re thinking, “oh, I’ll just write a custom Rake task that only loads plain-ol’ Ruby objects in lib/ and save myself the time to require Rails”, you may not realize that the very first thing your Rakefile does is load all of Rails (and probably most of your Gemfile, too).

I’d completely forgotten about this today when I wrote a little Rake task to run unit tests that didn’t depend on any Rails-aware code in lib/tasks/unit_test.rake :

require "rake/testtask" Rake :: TestTask . new( :unit_test ) do | t | t . warning = false t . libs << "test" t . libs << "app" t . libs << "lib" t . test_files = FileList [ 'test/**/*_unit_test.rb' ] end

I was feeling pretty clever, because any file ending in _unit_test.rb would belong to a logical test suite, even if intermingled with directories containing Rails-aware tests. And, because _unit_test.rb also ends in _test.rb , any unit tests would also be scooped up by our existing test task—meaning I wouldn’t have to futz with CI configuration or, even better, inform other developers on the project about what I was doing. (That last bit is important: the number one reason I saw the “fast specs” meme fail in practice was that less zealous team members would forget to run the extra test suite, only to be surprised when “Chris’s suite” would fail in CI.)

Isolated Rake task in hand, I wrote a dummy test and ran it with time rake unit_test :

# Running: . Finished in 0.001424s, 702.2472 runs/s, 702.2472 assertions/s. 1 runs, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips real 0m2.120s

Ruby isn’t the fastest interpreted language on the planet, but it’s surely fast enough to load Rake and run a two-line method in less than two seconds. Seeing this wall-time was a dead giveaway that Rails was being loaded before my task was even defined.

Aaron Patterson and I have investigated removing the Rails-generated Rakefile’s dependency on Rails in the past, but eliminating the application load from the Rake environment would be a nontrivial endeavor. And, at the end of the day, this isn’t really Rails’ problem. It’s a Rails app, it’s going to want to load Rails. News at 11.

So, where to turn if you want to run any tasks that are reliably divorced from Rails (and your other gems that lack a require => false directive in your Gemfile)? It turns out you can always just write an additional Rakefile.

The rake cli takes a predictable --rakefile argument, so if you write a Rakefile.norails , you can run it like this:

$ rake --rakefile Rakefile.norails

If you don’t find yourself writing many Rakefiles from scratch, you could get started by just cherry-picking the tasks you’d defined with the intention of not needing Rails, like so:

import "lib/tasks/unit_test.rake" task :default => :unit_test

This way, the :unit_test task will be available to both Rake configurations, sparing your colleagues any grief if they forget about your custom Rakefile and the two seconds it can save them. (If you’re befuddled why two seconds should matter to you, check out this tiny portion of my How to Stop Hating Your Tests talk.)

New, isolated Rakefile in hand, let’s try to run it with rake --rakefile Rakefile.norails :

# Running: . Finished in 0.001076s, 929.3680 runs/s, 929.3680 assertions/s. 1 runs, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips real 0m0.794s

Excellent, we cut our load time by more than half!

To figure out how low the floor is, we could cut it further by eliminating Rake and running just a single test using the ruby CLI. When I ran time ruby -I lib:test test/lib/simple_unit_test.rb , it yielded a 0.423s run time.

It would be tempting to call our work finished at this point, but there’s a lingering fear: what if one of these tests inadvertently requires some code that, in turn, results in Rails being loaded? It’s not hard to imagine that happening, and if just a single test were to accidentally load Rails, it would eradicate the intended benefit of this separate Rakefile.

So, can we ensure Rails isn’t loaded? We can! By using Ruby’s at_exit hook, we can add a check that the Rails constant is still undefined after all of our tasks are finished executing. Here’s what my final Rakefile.norails file looked like:

import "lib/tasks/unit_test.rake" task :default => :unit_test at_exit do if defined?( Rails ) raise "Rails wound up getting loaded by a Rakefile.norails task! Failing!" end end

But that’s still not enough! Because Rake::TestTask will spawn a separate test process, we also need to install this trip-wire somewhere in our test suite. I chose to throw it in my test/unit_test_helper.rb file:

require "minitest/autorun" class UnitTest < Minitest :: Test end MiniTest . after_run do if ENV [ 'NO_RAILS' ] && defined?( Rails ) raise "Rails wound up getting loaded by a unit test! Failing!" end end

Now, if either a test or a rake task were to load Rails, an error will be raised and the process will exit non-zero. Note the ENV['NO_RAILS'] condition, though. So that our unit tests won’t inadvertantly break our integrated rake task (recall that rake test will scoop up these new unit tests), we’ll need some kind of flag to ensure we only trigger this alarm in the event that the unit tests were launched via Rakefile.norails .

With that caveat, here’s our final Rakefile.norails file:

ENV [ 'NO_RAILS' ] = "true" import "lib/tasks/unit_test.rake" task :default => :unit_test at_exit do if defined?( Rails ) raise "Rails wound up getting loaded by a Rakefile.norails task! Failing!" end end

This approach to running tasks in isolation from Rails has a few benefits:

Only takes a few minutes to set up

Unit tests will also be run by the app’s existing test task

If someone forgets --rakefile Rakefile.norails , they can still run the unit_test task

, they can still run the task If a “no rails” task or a test inadvertently loads Rails, we’ll be alerted immediately

For a real-world example, this blog post resulted from this actual commit in Test Double’s present app, which we use internally for tracking time & generating invoices.