Ditching autotest for guard

less than 1 minute read

I have been using autotest for 2 years, and it’s been great ! The first time I ran it I thought “This rocks !” and I have always been using it since …

A little later I read the book Continuous Testing: with Ruby, Rails and JavaScript and it suggested to use watchr instead. I never switched, partly because I did not take the time, and partly because watchr seemed to need quite a bit of manual configuration. Then, while contributing to other gems, I stumbled upon guard and this one seemed great.

Switching to guard was in fact very simple, It took about 15 minutes, a lot less than the time I had spent configuring or tweaking autotest. I simply added these to my Gemfile

gem 'guard'
gem 'guard-rspec'
gem 'guard-cucumber'

I ran the install steps, and everything was working ! It’s a shame I did not do the change earlier.

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