Blacksmith

Blacksmith is a fixtures replacement that allows you to easily and programmatically forge test objects. An alternative to factory_girl.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'blacksmith'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install blacksmith

Blacksmith provides you with the concept of forges. A forge is basically a Ruby class with factory definitions in it.

class UserForge < Blacksmith::Forge
 def default
 forgeable do |user|
 user.first_name = "John"
 user.last_name = "Doe"
 user.email_address = "john.doe@example.com"
 end
 end
end

Let's use this in a test!

class UserTest < Minitest::Test
 include Blacksmith::Tooling
 def test_full_name
 forge = UserForge.new(User)
 user = make forge.default
 assert_equal "John Doe", user.full_name
 end
end

This might seem like a lot of boilerplate just to get a test passing. Fortunately, this can be rewritten like so:

Let's add a default creator to our UserForge.

class UserForge < Blacksmith::Forge
 def initialize(creator = User)
 super(creator)
 end
 def default
 forgeable do |user|
 user.first_name = "John"
 user.last_name = "Doe"
 user.email_address = "john.doe@example.com"
 end
 end
end

Now let's rewrite the test.

class UserTest < Minitest::Test
 include Blacksmith::Tooling
 def test_full_name
 user = make forge(:user)
 assert_equal "John Doe", user.full_name
 end
end

There are a number of things going on. forge allow us to implicitly reference our UserForge. Since we added a default creator to our UserForge we don't have to provide one. By default, forge will call the default factory if we don't provide another one.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/KevinSjoberg/blacksmith. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.