I am attempting to get watchr running tests automatically as files change, and got most of what I need working except for the fact that all ANSI colours from RSpec are being disregarded. The offending code is as follows:
stdin, stdout, stderr = Open3.popen3(cmd)
stdout.each_line do |line|
last_output = line
puts line
end
When cmd is equal to something like rspec spec/**/*.rb then the above code runs RSpec fine except that all output is in monochrome. I've looked at using Kernel.system instead, however system does not return the output which I need to determine if a test failed / succeeded. How can I get the output form a script that is executed from within Ruby including the ANSI color and output this to the console?
I would guess that rspec is examining the stream to which it is writing output to see if it is a tty (ie the console) or not, and if it's not, disabling colour. Many commands do this - GNU ls and grep, for example. Since the stream from the child process to your script is not a tty, colour will be disabled.
Hopefully, rspec has a flag which will force colour to be used, regardless of the stream type. If it doesn't, you will have to resort to some truly weird stty shenanigans.
Chances are good that the rspec tool is checking to see if it is running interactively on a terminal or being run automatically from a script before deciding to use color output or not.
The documentation says you can force color with --color command line option.
Try: rspec --color spec/**/*.rb.
It's possible to run commands in a pseudo terminal via the PTY module in order to preserve a user facing terminal-like behaviour. Credits go to the creator of the tty-command gem (see this issue) who implemented this behaviour in his gem:
require 'tty-command'
cmd = TTY::Command.new(pty: true)
cmd.run('rspec', 'spec/**/*.rb')
Keep in mind that using a pseudo terminal may have unwanted side effects, such as certain git commands using a pager which will essentially cause commands to hang. So introducing the functionality might be a breaking change.
Related
When a bash script is running, the set -x command can be used to print all commands and output as they're being executed.
I'm writing a Ruby script. Is there a way to also have this print the commands and output as they're being executed?
TL;DR
While interpreted, Ruby parses and runs code very differently from languages like Bash or Tcl, so there's no built-in way to do exactly what you want. You'll have to use a debugger or REPL to get something that approximates what you're trying to do, but it won't really be the same as using flags like -x or -v in Bash. An external or IDE-based debugger will probably come closest, though.
A Couple of Options
There is no built-in way to do this, as Ruby is not really a line-by-line interpreted language in the same way as Bash or Tcl. While Ruby is generally considered an interpreted language, it actually uses a tokenizer and parser to generate code that runs on a virtual machine such as YARV or GraalVM. You do have a couple of options, though:
Use the -d flag or set $DEBUG to a truthy value in your code, and then do some level of introspection based on whether the debug flag is enabled. For example:
# 1 is printed because $DEBUG is truthy
$ ruby -e 'BEGIN { $DEBUG = true }; puts 1 if $DEBUG'
1
# nothing is printed because $DEBUG is falsey
$ ruby -e 'puts 1 if $DEBUG'
Please note that Ruby 3.0.3 and 3.1.0 seem to have an issue with the -d flag, so the first example uses a BEGIN statement to set the value of the flag inside the program.
Use the debug gem (now standard with Ruby 3). You can either step through the code with rdbg and use the list command liberally, or (if you're clever) script a series of list commands on specific lines using the ~/.rdbgrc file.
Use an external debugger, with or without rdbg. Note that the new debugger supports IDE-based debugging (e.g. with RubyMine or VS Code) and remote debugging, but setting up IDE or remote debugging is likely a topic outside the scope of a reasonable SO answer.
Use irb or pry with the debugger of your choice, which usually gives you a number of ways to inspect source code, frames, expressions, variables, and so on, although you need to run from an on-disk file rather than a REPL to access some of the functionality you may be looking for.
For the most part, if you're not using an IDE or a debugger, you will generally need to rely on return values in a REPL or Kernel#pp statements in your code to inspect return values as you go along. However, short of a debugger or REPL that supports listing methods or lines of code on request, you'll either need to use external tools to solve whatever problem you're trying to solve via this approach another way.
Other Options
If you use pry, the pry-rescue gem along with pry-stack_explorer will allow you to automatically trigger a REPL session that allows you to traverse up and down the stack if you hit an exception without requiring you to start your session in the REPL or explicitly call binding.pry. On supported versions of Ruby, this can be very useful, especially since Pry supports a show-source -l command that will do something similar to what you want (at least interactively), although the line numbers may not be what you expect if the code is entered directly in the REPL rather than loaded from a Ruby program on disk.
I'm using a helper script to execute rspec tests.
command = "rake spec #{path} #{scope}"
output = `#{command}`
puts output
This works fine, except that I lose all the colors from the rake rspec output. The appropriate ANSI codes do not appear to be contained within the output string.
How can I execute a process so that it returns output which includes the text color?
Kernel.exec() gets me the solution I want (colored rspec output), but it does so by replacing my ruby script process with the rspec process. That means I can't do anything with the output or run anything after the rspec call.
That's acceptable in my particular situation, but less than ideal as a general solution. So I'd like a better answer if available.
RSpec will disable colour if it is not writing to a tty (i.e. the console).
In case of RSpec you can force colouring by rspec --tty or via rake by rake spec SPEC_OPTS=' --tty'.
See also Ruby popen3 and ANSI colour
However this solution is still specific to Rspec. I'd be interested to hear a general one.
Turns out it's possible to run commands in a pseudo terminal via the PTY module in order to preserve a user facing terminal-like behaviour. Credits go to the creator of the tty-command gem (see this issue) who implemented this behaviour in his gem:
require 'tty-command'
cmd = TTY::Command.new(pty: true)
cmd.run('rake', 'rspec')
Keep in mind that using a pseudo terminal may have unwanted side effects, such as certain git commands using a pager which will essentially cause commands to hang. So introducing the functionality might be a breaking change.
If you don't want to replace your ruby process with that command, use Kernel.system() or Kernel.spawn() instead of a Kernel.exec(). Both of them execute your command in a subshell, system waits for the subprocess to finish, spawn returns its pid and you have to wait by yourself using Process.wait pid.
command = "rake spec #{path} #{scope}"
system(command)
or
command = "rake spec #{path} #{scope}"
pid = spawn(command)
# Some other stuff here
Process.wait pid
what is the use of writing the following command at the start of a ruby program ?
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w
Is it OS specific command? Is it valid for ruby on windows ? if not, then what is an equivalent command in windows ?
It is called a Shebang. It tells the program loader what command to use to execute the file. So when you run ./myscript.rb, it actually translates to /usr/local/bin/ruby -w ./myscript.rb.
Windows uses file associations for the same purpose; the shebang line has no effect (edit: see FMc's answer) but causes no harm either.
A portable way (working, say, under Cygwin and RVM) would be:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
This will use the env command to figure out where the Ruby interpreter is, and run it.
Edit: apparently, precisely Cygwin will misbehave with /usr/bin/env ruby -w and try to look up ruby -w instead of ruby. You might want to put the effect of -w into the script itself.
The Shebang line is optional, and if you run the ruby interpreter and pass the script to it as a command line argument, then the flags you set on the command line are the flags ruby runs with.
A Shebang line is not ruby at all (unless you want to call it a ruby comment). It's really shell scripting. Most linux and unix users are running the BASH shell (stands for Borne Again SHell), but pretty much every OS has a command interpreter that will honor the Shebang.
“#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w”
The "she" part is the octothorp (#), aka pound sign, number sign, hash mark, and now hash tag (I still call it tic-tac-toe just cuz).
The "bang" part is the exclaimation mark (!), and it's like banging your fist on the table to exclaim the command.
On Windows, the "Shell" is the command prompt, but even without a black DOS window, the command interpreter will run the script based on file associations. It doesn't really matter if the command interpreter or the programming langue is reading the shebang and making sure the flags are honored, the important point is, they are honored.
The "-w" is a flag. Basically it's an instruction for ruby to follow when it runs the script. In this case "-w" turns on warnings, so you'll get extra warnings (script keeps running) or errors (script stops running) during the execution of the script. Warnings and exceptions can be caught and acted upon during the program. These help programmers find problems that lead to unexpected behavior.
I'm a fan of quick and dirty scripts to get a job done, so no -w. I'm also a fan of high quality reusable coding, so definitely use -w. The right tool for the right job. If you're learning, then always use -w. When you know what you're doing, and stop using -w on quick tasks, you'll start to figure out when it would have helped to use -w instead of spending hours trouble shooting. (Hint, when the cause of a problem isn't pretty obvious, just add -w and run it to see what you get).
"-w" requires some extra coding to make it clear to ruby what you mean, so it doesn't immediately solve things, but if you already write code with -w, then you won't have much trouble adding the necessary bits to make a small script run with warnings. In fact, if you're used to using -w, you're probably already writing code that way and -w won't change anything unless you've forgotten something. Ruby requires far less "plumbing code" then most (maybe all) compiled languages like C++, so choosing to not use -w doesn't allow you to save much typing, it just lets you think less before you try running the script (IMHO).
-v is verbose mode, and does NOT change the running of the script (no warnings are raised, no stopping the script in new places). Several sites and discussions call -w verbose mode, but -w is warning mode and it changes the execution of the script.
Although the execution behavior of a shebang line does not translate directly to the Windows world, the flags included on that line (for example the -w in your question) do affect the running Ruby script.
Example 1 on a Windows machine:
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w
puts $VERBOSE # true
Example 2 on a Windows machine:
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
puts $VERBOSE # false
I am writing a small script for watchr that runs my PHP unit tests.
Current script runs tests using system() and displays them colored.
I am trying to add libnotify functionality, but for that I need to parse the output and match against regexp, so that notification will either display green or red.
system() doesn't return output, %x does return, but puts p doesn't display colors, which I need to quickly see which test failed. One option would be to run tests twice - once for display in terminal window, and second time for checking which notification to show, but I would rather avoid it.
puts does display colors. The problem is when you run with %x your PHP test runner will most likely turn off colored output because it thinks it's not running under a terminal.
The same thing happens if you do run_php_test | less in the shell. To fix it you need to force colored output on the PHP test runner.
EDIT
Easiest way to run a subprocess with pty:
require 'pty'
puts PTY.spawn('run_php_test')[0].read
I have an app that runs continuously, dumping output from a server and sending strings to stdout. I want to process this output with a Ruby script. The strings are \n-terminated.
For example, I'm trying to run this on the command line:
myapp.exe | my_script.rb
...with my_script.rb defined as:
while $stdin.gets
puts $_
end
I ultimately am going to process the strings using regexes and display some summary data, but for now I'm just trying to get the basic functionality hooked up. When I run the above, I get the following error:
my_script.rb:1:in `gets': Bad file descriptor (Errno::EBADF)
from my_script.rb:1
I am running this on Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 and Ruby 1.8.6.
How do I continuously process stdin in a Ruby script? (Continuously as in not processing a file, but running until I kill it.)
EDIT:
I was able to make this work, sort of. There were several problems standing in my way. For one thing, it may be that using Ruby to process the piped-in stdin from another process doesn't work on Windows 2003R2. Another direction, suggested by Adrian below, was to run my script as the parent process and use popen to connect to myapp.exe as a forked child process. Unfortunately, fork isn't implemented in Windows, so this didn't work either.
Finally I was able to download POpen4, a RubyGem that does implement popen on Windows. Using this in combination with Adrian's suggestion, I was able to write this script which does what I really want -- processes the output from myapp.exe:
file: my_script.rb
require 'rubygems'
require 'popen4'
status =
POpen4::popen4("myapp.exe") do |stdout, stderr, stdin, pid|
puts pid
while s = stdout.gets
puts s
end
end
This script echoes the output from myapp.exe, which is exactly what I want.
Try just plain gets, without the $stdin. If that doesn't work, you might have to examine the output of myapp.exe for non-printable characters with another ruby script, using IO.popen.
gets doesn't always use stdin but instead tries to open a file.
See SO.
Try executing your Ruby script by explicitly calling ruby:
myapp.exe | ruby my_script.rb
I've experienced some odd behavior using stdin in Ruby when relying on Windows to invoke the correct program based on the file associations.