Question

Is there a way to get RSpec to report failures as they occur, instead of the long list of green/red dots?
I’m running RSpec 2.5.0.

Answer 1

RSpec supports multiple output formats, specified with the --format option. The default is “progress”, the string of dots you’re seeing. If you change to a more verbose format, you’ll see the name of the test in red/green as you run, but you still won’t see what the failure was until the summary that’s printed at the end.

The other format options, from running rspec --help are:

-f, --format FORMATTER           Choose a formatter
                                   [p]rogress (default - dots)
                                   [d]ocumentation (group and example names)
                                   [h]tml
                                   [t]extmate
                                   custom formatter class name

In addition to specifying format on the command line, you can put a “.rspec” file in your home directory to specify default options.