One of the things I’ve tried to do with Thinking Sphinx has been to keep it friendly for a few different versions of Rails/ActiveRecord: 1.2.6, 2.0.x and 2.1.x. It’s not that easy, because I know I don’t think about which methods are pre-Rails-2.0, and which are even newer. And add on top of that the large (and very welcome) number of contributors, and it becomes a bit of a headache.

I was introduced to a potential aid for this at RailsConf EU, by fellow Australian Ian White, in the form of his library Garlic. It takes Rails plugins, instantiates them within Rails applications for each defined environment, and then runs their specs.

That in itself is pretty damn cool - except I don’t run Thinking Sphinx’s specs from within Rails - and it’s really only reliant on ActiveRecord (so it can be used in Merb). So, I’ve spent an afternoon coding up something slightly different, but in something of an acknowledgement to Ian’s library, my solution is called Ginger.

Now, it’s not exhaustively tested, but I’ve got it to the point where it runs as I would expect it to with Thinking Sphinx, so consider it ready for release.

If you’re interested in using it, here’s the basic guidelines. First up, install the gem:

sudo gem install freelancing-god-ginger --source=http://gems.github.com

(GitHub doesn’t have the gem loaded at the moment though, so you’ll have to install it manually)

git clone git://github.com/freelancing-god/ginger.git
cd ginger
gem build ginger.gemspec
sudo gem install --local ginger-1.0.0.gem

Then, in your spec_helper.rb file (or equivalent - this should work for Test::Unit as well as RSpec), add:

require 'ginger'

You’ll want to make sure that require is before any other require calls to libraries you want to test multiple versions of.

Next, you need to create a scenario file, outlining the different testing situations Ginger should run through. These details go in a file called ginger_scenarios.rb in the root of your project. Here’s my current one for Thinking Sphinx:

require 'ginger'

Ginger.configure do |config|
  config.aliases["active_record"] = "activerecord"

  ar_1_2_6 = Ginger::Scenario.new
  ar_1_2_6[/^active_?record$/] = "1.15.6"

  ar_2_0_2 = Ginger::Scenario.new
  ar_2_0_2[/^active_?record$/] = "2.0.2"

  ar_2_1_1 = Ginger::Scenario.new
  ar_2_1_1[/^active_?record$/] = "2.1.1"

  config.scenarios << ar_1_2_6 << ar_2_0_2 << ar_2_1_1
end

I’m adding three different scenarios - one for each version of ActiveRecord I want to test. I’m also adding an alias, as sometimes people have an underscore in the require calls, and while the require method isn’t fussy, the gem method is. That’s also the reason for the regular expressions, but strings will work as well.

If you want, you can have multiple gem requirements for each scenario - Ginger::Scenario is subclassed from Hash, so just add more key/value pairs as needed.

sphinx_scenario = Ginger::Scenario.new
sphinx_scenario["riddle"] = "0.9.8" 
sphinx_scenario["thinking_sphinx"] = "0.9.8"

And don’t forget to add each scenario to config’s collection.

The last step is the most important - running your tests through each scenario! This is done with the ginger command line tool - any arguments given to it get echoed onto rake, so in theory it should work with whatever rake task you like. I’ve only tested it with RSpec though.

ginger spec
ginger test
ginger spec:unit

This was built to scratch my itch, obviously, but happy to accept patches or suggestions. GitHub, as always, is the best way to do this - fork to your heart’s content.