Global setup and teardown blocks in Test::Unit

Assuming you're using Rails. Just add following in your test/test_helper.rb file.

class ActiveSupport::TestCase  setup :global_setup  def global_setup    #stuff to run before _every_ test.  endend

Tested on Rails 3.0.9.

You could just patch Test::Unit::TestCase and define a setup method:

class Test::Unit::TestCase  def setup    puts 'in setup'  endend

And your subclasses would just use this by default:

class FooTest < Test::Unit::TestCase  def test_truth    assert true  endendclass BarTest < Test::Unit::TestCase  def test_truth    assert true  endend

If a test case needed to have its own setup, you would need to call super first to ensure that the global setup runs:

class BazTest < Test::Unit::TestCase  def setup    super    puts 'custom setup'  end  def test_truth    assert true  endend

Is having a global setup really something you need to do, or would it be helpful to have a helper method defined on Test::Unit::TestCase and call that in the tests that need it? The helper method approach is something that I find beneficial on my projects – the setup state and intention is clearer in each individual test and I don't need to jump around to find some "hidden" setup method. Quite often, a global setup is a code smell indicating that you need to rethink part of your design, but YMMV.

Update

Since you're using ActiveSupport, here's a first stab at something that won't require a call to super each time you define a setup method in your test case. I don't know how valuable it is, since it requires a call to a different method and any developer can just define their own setup method in the test case that will invalidate this change. Here it is:

require 'rubygems'require 'test/unit'require 'active_support'require 'active_support/test_case'class ActiveSupport::TestCase  def setup_with_global    puts 'In Global setup'    setup_without_global  end  alias_method_chain :setup, :globalendclass FooTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase  def setup_without_global    puts 'In Local setup'  end  def test_truth    assert true  endend