Tired of looking at the console to know if the tests passed or failed?
AutoTest (part of ZenTest suite) is a very useful tool when you are working with Ruby On Rails development, but I always had problems configuring cool notifications for it, until now!
A friend of mine, started a little project to develop a gem (his first idea was just a lib for his own use, but now it turned to be an open source gem), that makes really easy to setup AutoTest to notify you of test results in a very cool way!
If you have a Mac, it will use Growl.
If you have windows, it will use Snarl.
If you have a Linux Box, it will use zenity or libnotify for Gnome and kdialog for KDE (I think libnotify works for any desktop environment).
And it is even cooler that this, if you run a Mac or Linux box, it can talk to you when your tests fail!
The project is hosted at GitHub, and to use it, you just need to run this two commands:
gem install carlosbrando-autotest-notification --source=http://gems.github.com
an-install
if you want it to talk to you, replace the last command with:
an-install -s
the voice code for linux is not in the main repository yet, it is on my fork, so if you run a linux box, and want to play with voice notification, you need to have espeak installed, and install my instead of the primary one (at least until the code is pushed back).
gem install urubatan-autotest-notification --source=http://gems.github.com
If you have a Windows box and want to play with voice notification, be a smart guy, format your machine ans install linux, you will be a lot happier that you are today 
If this is not an option for you, you can always fork the project, write the code for a windows speech engine, and send us a pull request
Bellow a quote from the project readme about the dependencies of each platform:
* If you’re using a Mac:
You need to have Growl and growlnotify installed on your machine.Download the Growl [http://growl.info/index.php] and install it like any other application on your Mac
Then you must install the growlnotify.
In your shell, cd to the directory on the Growl disk image containing growlnotify, and type ./install.sh.
That script will install growlnotify to /usr/local/bin and the manpage to /usr/local/man.* If you’re using Windows (with cygwin):
You need to have Snarl and sncmd installed on your machine.Download Snarl [http://www.fullphat.net/] and install it like any other application on your machine.
Then download sncmd [http://www.k23productions.com/download.php?view.105] open the zip file and place
the executable from the zip in any directory in windows PATH (for example c:\windows).* If you’re using Windows (without cygwin):
You need to have Snarl, diffutils and ruby-snarl installed on your machine.Download Snarl [http://www.fullphat.net/] and install it like any other application on your machine.
Download DiffUtils for Windows [http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/diffutils.htm] and follow the installation
instructions on the site.Run in the command prompt:
$ gem install ruby-snarl
After all that. You must update the environment variable PATH with the path to the bin of diffutils.
It’s the price that was paid for using Windows (try cygwin).* If you’re using Linux:
You need to have libnotify binaries installed.For ubuntu this means: sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin
Other distributions may package it with other names, do a search for libnotify using your distribution package
manager.If you use KDE and do not have libnotify-bin installed, it will try to use kdialog wich is part of KDE.
It also works if you have zenity installed.If you want to be notified with voice of the test results, instal espeak too, it is not needed.
And when running an-install, pass a “-s” switch, when you do not want voices notifications anymore, just run it
again without the “-s” switch.
I know that you can live without this cool new toy, but think about your work mates trying to figure out, how do your computer can tell you that your tests passed or not
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
