Machinist 2

Fixtures aren't fun. Machinist is.

Machinist 2 is still in beta!

If you're using Rails 3, you'll want to give Machinist 2 a go, but be aware that the documentation is still patchy.

That said, have a look at the specs, starting with the spec for Machinable. No, really, have a look. I wrote this code to be read, and the specs do a pretty clean job of documenting what it all does.

If, on the other hand, you want the tried, tested, and well-documented official release version of Machinist, then go with Machinist 1.

Home page
Google group, for support
Bug tracker, for reporting Machinist bugs

Introduction

Machinist makes it easy to create objects for use in tests. It generates data for the attributes you don't care about, and constructs any necessary associated objects, leaving you to specify only the fields you care about in your test. For example:

describe Comment, "without_spam scope" do
  it "doesn't include spam" do
    # This will make a Comment, a Post, and a User (the author of the
    # Post), generate values for all their attributes, and save them:
    spam = Comment.make!(:spam => true)

    Comment.without_spam.should_not include(spam)
  end
end

You tell Machinist how to do this with blueprints:

require 'machinist/active_record'

User.blueprint do
  username { "user#{sn}" }  # Each user gets a unique serial number.
end

Post.blueprint do
  author
  title  { "Post #{sn}" }
  body   { "Lorem ipsum..." }
end

Comment.blueprint do
  post
  email { "commenter#{sn}@example.com" }
  body  { "Lorem ipsum..." }
end

Installation

Upgrading from Machinist 1

See the wiki.

Rails 3

In your app's Gemfile, in the group :test section, add:

gem 'machinist', '>= 2.0.0.beta2'

Then run:

bundle
rails generate machinist:install

If you want Machinist to automatically add a blueprint to your blueprints file whenever you generate a model, add the following to your config/application.rb inside the Application class:

config.generators do |g|
  g.fixture_replacement :machinist
end

Rails 2

See the wiki.

Usage

Blueprints

A blueprint describes how to generate an object. The blueprint takes care of providing attributes that your test doesn't care about, leaving you to focus on just the attributes that are important for the test.

A simple blueprint might look like this:

Post.blueprint do
  title  { "A Post" }
  body   { "Lorem ipsum..." }
end

You can then construct a Post from this blueprint with:

Post.make!

When you call make!, Machinist calls Post.new, then runs through the attributes in your blueprint, calling the block for each attribute to generate a value. It then saves and reloads the Post. (It throws an exception if the Post can't be saved.)

You can override values defined in the blueprint by passing a hash to make:

Post.make!(:title => "A Specific Title")

If you want to generate an object without saving it to the database, replace make! with make.

Unique Attributes

For attributes that need to be unique, you can call the sn method from within the attribute block to get a unique serial number for the object.

User.blueprint do
  username { "user-#{sn}" }
end

Associations

If your object needs associated objects, you can generate them like this:

Comment.blueprint do
  post { Post.make }
end

Calling Comment.make! will construct a Comment and its associated Post, and save both.

Machinist is smart enough to look at the association and work out what sort of object it needs to create, so you can shorten the above blueprint to:

Comment.blueprint do
  post
end

If you want to override the value for post when constructing the comment, you can do this:

post = Post.make(:title => "A particular title)
comment = Comment.make(:post => post)

For has_many and has_and_belongs_to_many associations, you can create multiple associated objects like this:

Post.blueprint do
  comments(3)  # Makes 3 comments.
end

Named Blueprints

Named blueprints let you define variations on an object. For example, suppose some of your Users are administrators:

User.blueprint do
  name  { "User #{sn}" }
  email { "user-#{sn}@example.com" }
end

User.blueprint(:admin) do
  name  { "Admin User #{sn}" }
  admin { true }
end

Calling:

User.make!(:admin)

will use the :admin blueprint.

Named blueprints call the default blueprint to set any attributes not specifically provided, so in this example the email attribute will still be generated even for an admin user.

You must define a default blueprint for any class that has a named blueprint, even if the default blueprint is empty.

Blueprints on Plain Old Ruby Objects

Machinist also works with plain old Ruby objects. Let's say you have a class like:

class Post
  extend Machinist::Machinable

  attr_accessor :title
  attr_accessor :body
end

You can blueprint the Post class just like anything else:

Post.blueprint do
  title { "A title!" }
  body  { "A body!" }
end

And Post.make will construct a new Post.

Other Tricks

You can refer to already assigned attributes when constructing a new attribute:

Post.blueprint do
  author { "Author #{sn}" }
  body   { "Post by #{object.author}" }
end

Compatibility

I've tested this with:

Ruby versions: 1.8.7, 1.9.2 Rails versions: 2.3, 3.0

It may well be happy with other versions too, but I'm not promising anything. Compatibility patches are welcome.

Developing

The Machinist specs and source code were written to be read, and I'm pretty happy with them. Don't be afraid to have a look under the hood!

If you want to submit a patch:

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Status

In active use in a number of large Rails 2 apps.

Development has been sporadic, but is picking up again.

Contributors

Machinist is maintained by Pete Yandell (pete@notahat.com, @notahat)

Other contributors include:

Marcos Arias, Jack Dempsey, Jeremy Durham, Clinton Forbes, Perryn Fowler, Niels Ganser, Jeremy Grant, Jon Guymon, James Healy, Ben Hoskings, Evan David Light, Chris Lloyd, Adam Meehan, Kyle Neath, Lawrence Pit, Xavier Shay, T.J. Sheehy, Roland Swingler, Gareth Townsend, Matt Wastrodowski, Ian White

Thanks to Thoughtbot's Factory Girl. Machinist was written because I loved the idea behind Factory Girl, but I thought the philosophy wasn't quite right, and I hated the syntax.

mckinnsb/machinist