Dev Environment Tests Not 100% Compatible with Staging/Production in Rails

Question

We use a bunch of specific apps/APIs that (unfortunately) differ quite a bit from dev to staging/production. We use tests and continuous integration at each stage, but in dev, the tests fail annoyingly (throwing dialogs, etc - thanks Windows for the 64-bit notification!). I hate to write custom code, but are there some best practices for how to allow a subset of testing in ruby/rails - or for patching out specific tests when you're running on Windows?

Some specific situations that:

• Identify.exe does not support 64-bit Windows and throws a dialog.
• Sethostname is not supported, and throws an error (at least it's command line).

Answer 1

You can mock out the code to decouple the dependency on the other apps. Use Mocha to create the mocks dynamically.