rspec Getting started with rspec A simple RSpec example

Example

In greeter.rb (wherever that goes in your project):

class Greeter
  def greet
    "Hello, world!"
  end
end

In spec/greeter_spec.rb:

require_relative '../greeter.rb'

RSpec.describe Greeter do
  describe '#greet' do
    it "says hello" do
      expect(Greeter.new.greet).to eq("Hello, world!")
    end
  end
end

So our file structure looks like:

$ tree .
.
├── greeter.rb
└── spec
    └── greeter_spec.rb

1 directory, 2 files

Output

$rspec greeter_spec.rb
Finished in 0.00063 seconds (files took 0.06514 seconds to load)
1 example, 0 failures

In RSpec terminology, the file is a "spec" of Greeter and the it block is an "example". The line with expect is an expectation. If the expectation is met, nothing happens and the test passes. If not, the test fails.

This example also shows that describe blocks can be nested, in this case to convey that the greet method is part of the Greet class. The # in #greet is only a convention to show that greet is an instance method (as opposed to '.' for a class method). RSpec doesn't interpret the string at all, so you could use a different string or omit that describe block entirely.