Faster Hello World with Aruba

In my first article about Aruba, it was introducing how to use Aruba to test any program, even Hello World! But…

There is a way to make the Hello World specs run faster than the way introduced in my aruba starter project: remove the sleep(1) command from the spec.

Update source files

In the top of the main source file include the following line at the top of the source file:

• #!/usr/bin/env ruby for Ruby files
• #!/usr/bin/env python for Python files
• and nothing needed for the bash file

Make file executable

On the command line, execute chmod +x <file>, like so:

u@system:~/aruba_starter$ chmod +x src/hello_world.rb src/hello_world.py src/hello_world.sh

Now, the hello_world.rb program can be run like any command by:

u@system:~/aruba_starter$ ./src/hello_world.rb

as well as:

u@system:~/aruba_starter$ ruby src/hello_world.rb

Pretty neat, right?

Update specs

Well, the cooler part is by doing this, sleep(1) can be removed from the spec file and the run command is now:

run('hello_world.rb')

Troubleshooting

If there is an error when running the specs, that says “Aruba::LaunchError” or has the following form:

Aruba::LaunchError:
  Command "... PATH...".

If the file is in the specified path, then the main issue is the file does not have executable permissions. (Double check chmod +x worked.)

To see the changes, please take a look at the file: faster_hello_specs.rb.

Overall

With everything working, the specs will take 0.34171 seconds to run instead of 4.35 seconds. 12x improvement in speed with very little code changes.

Go forth and test (faster!)