Problem with `rake test`… rake reports "Could not find task ./test/whatever-my-first-test-file-is.rb"

Question

I've put this information into a pastie, but repeated it here (pastie link http://pastie.org/private/4vprzwhllqv35egrf8jzwg )

The problem showed up in my own project, but I have no idea what i'm doing wrong: here's the full output:

$ rake test

(in /Users/me/Projects/version-three)
/Users/me/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-rc2/bin/ruby -I"lib:test" "/Users/me/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-rc2/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb" "./test/test_a.rb" "./test/test_configuration.rb" "./test/test_generator_base.rb" "./test/test_lazy_attr_accessor.rb" "./test/test_output_spokesman.rb" "./test/test_path_for_executable.rb" 
Test run options: --seed 28629

Loaded suite /Users/me/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-rc2/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake/rake_test_loader
Started

...............Could not find task "./test/test_a.rb".
......

Finished in 0.014943 seconds.

21 tests, 19 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips
Test run options: --seed 28629

As you can see there is an erroneous Could not find task "./test/test_a.rb" - I added this file simply to stop it choking on my first file with important tests!

The Rakefile couldn't be simpler, just this:

require 'rake/testtask'

task :default => :test

Rake::TestTask.new do |t|
  t.libs << "test"
  t.test_files = FileList['./test/test_*.rb']
  t.verbose = true
end

I'm using the following versions of relevant tools, as you can see I'm using RVM and I see the same problem on Ruby 1.8.7.

$ rake --version
  rake, version 0.8.7

$ ruby --version
  ruby 1.9.2dev (2010-07-11 revision 28618) [x86_64-darwin10.4.0]

$ rvm --version
  rvm 0.1.43 by Wayne E. Seguin ([email protected]) [http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/]

Answer 1

It appears this problem comes up when requiring Thor - it's a rake replacement, supposedly - perhaps I need to look into it more, but one of my tests was testing a Thor backed generator.

I'll look into what's going on more thoroughly!

I have identified the (foolish) problem, the message is actually coming out of Thor, I had a line that read like:

  def test_banner_if_starting_generator_with_no_args
    ::Cli::Generator.start(ARGV)
    # Test the banner output here...
  end

And of course ARGV was being set to the first file in the list assembled by Rake's FileList and passed to the test loader.

Sorry for wasting anyone's time who looked into this.

Solution: stub the ARGV to [] since that's effectively what I'm testing!