Autotest on Ubuntu 11.10 running Rails 3.2

I’m reading and working through Ruby on Rails Tutorial from Michael Hartl. The book rightly promotes a "test first" approach. In this Hartl mentions autotest. As the text mentions, "configuring it can be a bit tricky."

Here are the steps I used to get autotest working on my Ubuntu 11.10 OS running Rails 3.2.0.rc2:

$ gem install autotest

$ gem install autotest-rails-pure

$ sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

$ gem install autotest-notification

Next, I added the ~/.autotest file:

	# ~.autotest
	require 'rubygems'
	require 'autotest_notification'
	SPEAKING = false
	DOOM_EDITION = false
	BUUF = false
	PENDING = false
	STICKY = false
	SUCCESS_SOUND = ''
	FAILURE_SOUND = ''

view raw .autotest hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Then, I simply ran autotest from my rails app directory:

$ rails-apps/myapp autotest

This is nice in that I do not have to manually run the rspec tests as autotest runs each time I change a test file or the tested implementation code.