Blacksmith

Blacksmith is a fixtures replacement that allows you to easily and programmatically forge test objects. An alternative to factory_girl.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'blacksmith'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install blacksmith

Usage

Blacksmith provides you with the concept of forges. A forge is basically a Ruby class with factory definitions in it.

class UserForge < Blacksmith::Forge
  def default
    forgeable do |user|
      user.first_name = "John"
      user.last_name = "Doe"
      user.email_address = "john.doe@example.com"
    end
  end
end

Let's use this in a test!

class UserTest < Minitest::Test
  include Blacksmith::Tooling

  def test_full_name
    forge = UserForge.new(User)
    user = make forge.default
    assert_equal "John Doe", user.full_name
  end
end

This might seem like a lot of boilerplate just to get a test passing. Fortunately, this can be rewritten like so:

Let's add a default creator to our UserForge.

class UserForge < Blacksmith::Forge
  def initialize(creator = User)
    super(creator)
  end

  def default
    forgeable do |user|
      user.first_name = "John"
      user.last_name = "Doe"
      user.email_address = "john.doe@example.com"
    end
  end
end

Now let's rewrite the test.

class UserTest < Minitest::Test
  include Blacksmith::Tooling

  def test_full_name
    user = make forge(:user)
    assert_equal "John Doe", user.full_name
  end
end

There are a number of things going on. forge allow us to implicitly reference our UserForge. Since we added a default creator to our UserForge we don't have to provide one. By default, forge will call the default factory if we don't provide another one.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/KevinSjoberg/blacksmith. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.