Create a named screen session:

steve@machine:~$ screen -S lhm

Or, name your existing session:

Ctrl-a :sessionname lhm

Turn on screens multi user mode and give access to the root user:

Ctrl-a :multiuser on
Ctrl-a :acladd root

Now any admin user can attach to this screen session with the following command:

sudo screen -x steve/lhm

This is useful when you want to give other admin users the ability to view and control a long running task that you started.

One approach is to use aruba to generate a new Rails app, run bundle install, run your generator then verify it did the right thing. The problem with this approach is that it’s really, really slow. The approach Rails::Generators::TestCase takes is to run the generator in the current process against a temporary directory. This is much faster.

Today I released generator_spec for testing generators with RSpec. It’s a thin wrapper around Rails::Generators::TestCase, with the same assertions and setup methods available. It also comes with a really nice file structure matcher.

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require "generator_spec/test_case"

describe InstallGenerator do
  include GeneratorSpec::TestCase
  destination File.expand_path("../../tmp", __FILE__)
  
  before do
    # Methods from Rails::Generators::TestCase are made available to the RSpec test
    prepare_destination
    run_generator
  end

  specify do
    destination_root.should have_structure {
      no_file "non_existant.rb"
      directory "config" do
        directory "initializers" do
          file "mygem.rb" do
            contains "# Change this"
          end
        end
      end
      directory "db" do
        directory "migrate" do
          migration "create_tests" do
            contains "class TestMigration"
          end
        end
      end
    }
  end
end