自动运行失败了rspec测试

Question

I have some code in my tests which works with some external service. This service is not very stable, so sometimes it crash for no reason. But in 80% of runs it works well.

So I want a method to automatically rerun all failed rspecs several time (for example 2 or 3 time). Is there any way to do it?

Answer 1

Many people would say that your test actually should never hit external services, and that's one of the reasons to do it. Your tests should not fail because some external service is down.

TL;DR use mocks and stubs or to replace those external service calls

Answer 2

Instead of re-running failed specs, couldn't you just run the method accessing the service a set number of times and run the expectation on the logical OR of the results?

So instead of:

it "returns expected value for some args" do
   unstable_external_service(<some args>).should == <expected return value>
end

just do something like this:

def run_x_times(times, args)
  return nil if times == 0
  unstable_external_service(args) || run_x_times(times-1)
end

it "returns expected value for some args" do
  run_x_times(10, <some args>).should == <expected return value>
end

You can use the same wrapper method throughout your tests anytime you access the service. I'm assuming here that your service returns nil on a failure, but if not you could change this to fit your particular case -- you get the general idea.