Appraisal

Find out what your Ruby gems are worth.

Synopsis

Appraisal integrates with bundler and rake to test your library against different versions of dependencies in repeatable scenarios called "appraisals." Appraisal is designed to make it easy to check for regressions in your library without interfering with day-to-day development using Bundler.

Installation

In your Gemfile:

gem "appraisal"

Note that gems must be bundled in the global namespace. Bundling gems to a local location or vendoring plugins is not supported. If you do not want to pollute the global namespace, one alternative is RVM's Gemsets.

Setup

Setting up appraisal requires an Appraisals file (similar to a Gemfile) in your project root, named "Appraisals" (note the case), and some slight changes to your project's Rakefile.

An Appraisals file consists of several appraisal definitions. An appraisal definition is simply a list of gem dependencies. For example, to test with a few versions of Rails:

appraise "rails-3" do
  gem "rails", "3.2.14"
end

appraise "rails-4" do
  gem "rails", "4.0.0"
end

The dependencies in your Appraisals file are combined with dependencies in your Gemfile, so you don't need to repeat anything that's the same for each appraisal. If something is specified in both the Gemfile and an appraisal, the version from the appraisal takes precedence.

It's also recommended that you setup bundler at the very top of your Rakefile, so that you don't need to constantly run bundle exec:

require "rubygems"
require "bundler/setup"

Usage

Once you've configured the appraisals you want to use, you need to install the dependencies for each appraisal:

appraisal install

This will resolve, install, and lock the dependencies for that appraisal using bundler. Once you have your dependencies set up, you can run any command in a single appraisal:

appraisal rails-3 rake test

This will run rake test using the dependencies configured for Rails 3. You can also run each appraisal in turn:

appraisal rake test

If you want to use only the dependencies from your Gemfile, just run rake test as normal. This allows you to keep running with the latest versions of your dependencies in quick test runs, but keep running the tests in older versions to check for regressions.

In the case that you want to run all the appraisals by default when you run rake, you can override your default Rake task by put this into your Rakefile:

if !ENV["APPRAISAL_INITIALIZED"] && !ENV["TRAVIS"]
  task :default => :appraisal
end

(Appraisal sets APPRAISAL_INITIALIZED environment variable when it runs your process. We put a check here to ensure that appraisal rake command should run your real default task, which usually is your test task.)

Note that this may conflict with your CI setup if you decide to split the test into multiple processes by Appraisal and you are using rake to run tests by default. Please see Travis CI Integration for more detail.

Under the hood

Running appraisal install generates a Gemfile for each appraisal by combining your root Gemfile with the specific requirements for each appraisal. These are stored in the gemfiles directory, and should be added to version control to ensure that the same versions are always used.

When you prefix a command with appraisal, the command is run with the appropriate Gemfile for that appraisal, ensuring the correct dependencies are used.

Version Control

When using Appraisal, we recommend you check in the Gemfiles that Appraisal generates within the gemfiles directory, but exclude the lockfiles there (*.gemfile.lock.) The Gemfiles are useful when running your tests against a continuous integration server such as Travis CI.

Travis CI integration

If you're using Appraisal and using Travis CI, we're recommending you to setup Travis to run the test against multiple generated Gemfiles. This can be done by using gemfile setting:

# In .travis.yml
gemfile:
  - gemfiles/3.0.gemfile
  - gemfiles/3.1.gemfile
  - gemfiles/3.2.gemfile

Please note that if you've set your default rake task to run the test against all versions of its dependency, you might have to set a script setting:

script: "bundle exec rake test"

That will make sure that each of the test sub-job are not getting run more than one time.

You can also run your tests against multiple versions of Ruby locally, just like running on Travis CI, by using WWTD.

Credits

Appraisal is maintained and funded by thoughtbot, inc

Thank you to all the contributors

The names and logos for thoughtbot are trademarks of thoughtbot, inc.

brenes/appraisal