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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T01:05:28+00:00

We’ve recently upgraded our Rails application. To be extra sure everything works, I’ve tried

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We’ve recently upgraded our Rails application.
To be extra sure everything works, I’ve tried to get the tests and specs of the various used plugins (26 at current count) to work, thinking then to add those to our continuous integration, which only runs the main application’s specs.

I’ve run into a lot of problems even getting the specs/tests to run at all, not even getting to any individual test failures. For example, I’ve run across this problem: http://rails_security.lighthouseapp.com/projects/15332/tickets/7-rake-spec-plugin-fails-on-rails-2-1 (thanks by the way for that ticket, even though the issue wasn’t fixed).

So the question is: Are we unusual in that we’ve ever cared about running plugin tests ? It doesn’t seem to feature much here on SO. My nagging feeling is that they should be run as much as the main specs, but you could also argue that since the main specs work, the plugins must also work.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Alot of it depends on the plugin/gem being used.

    If I know the author/community of the gem is competant I will skip the tests and simply use the latest stable release and freeze that gem. I will then track the progress of the development using github.

    If the plugin/gem is written by an unknown party I will run the tests and freeze the gem/plugin and again monitor the development.

    Sometimes however I will write my own contributions to the gem and fork the code. I will clone the repo in github and base my installations from that. At which point any and all changes result in a complete test run.

    With all things in the open source world there is an element of trust between the creator and the users of those pieces of code. The tests themselves don’t tell me much about the codebase, it shows there are tests and thats it. Do they test everything ? Are there edge cases ? . Its this element of trust I have with certain developers in the community that means I forgo worrying over running tests for those gems.

    Its a slippery slope testing everything, where does it stop ? Would you test rails every release ? No, you assume the community has done this for you already.

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