Focusing on one or more tests with Rspec

You can tell Rspec to run only tests tagged with "focus: true" by running Rspec with the --tag focus switch:

rspec ./spec/controllers/concerns/session_expiry_spec.rb --tag focus

This would run e.g. only this test which is marked with focus: true

it "resets session if session has expired", focus: true do
...
end

Integrating with Guard

Use this configuration to integrate this workflow with Guard:

guard 'rspec', cli: '--tag focus --format d --color', all_after_pass: false, all_on_start: false do
...
end

We also want to run all tests when there are no focused tests. We therefore add this to spec/spec_helper.rb:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  # This is dangerous with CI integration e.g. Jenkins
  # config.filter_run focus: true
  config.run_all_when_everything_filtered = true
end

Rspec configuration file

One alternative is to enable the focus option in the Rspec configuration file:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.filter_run :focus => true
  config.run_all_when_everything_filtered = true

However, this would be dangerous when running tests with e.g. Jenkins and when someone forgets to remove "focus: true".