Testing

Use rspec with Rails

TODO: Write about why rspec over minitest

Time Travel

There's a great gem called timecop but since a few versions ago Rails has its own implementation that is slightly more lightweight but also covers most common use cases.

The module in question is ActiveSupport::Testing::TimeHelpers and to use it you should first include it in your rails_helper.rb file:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  # ... your other settings
  config.include ActiveSupport::Testing::TimeHelpers
end

You can then easily use freeze_time, travel and travel_to methods, which comes in very handy when dealing with integration and unit tests that are time related. For bonus points you can wrap it up in a block to never worry about having to restore previous state again.

Here are a few examples:

freeze_time do
  time1 = Time.now
  sleep 2
  time2 = Time.now
  time1 == time2 # => true
end

Time.now # => 2019-07-24 22:56:29 +0200
travel 1.day do
  p Time.now # => 2019-07-25 22:56:29 +0200
end

travel_to Time.zone.local(2019, 2, 2, 9, 9, 0) do
  p Time.now # => Left as an exercise to the reader
end