Spork, RSpec, Sham and Caching Classes

This is my favorite testing trifecta:

RSpec as the testing framework.
Spork as the Distributed Ruby environment.
Sham to create model factories.

The problem I ran into recently though was that when running RSpec tests using Spork, changes to my models were not causing the files to re-load in the DRB environment. This was a big problem - it meant that the benefits provided by Spork were virtually non-existent because every file change forced me to re-boot my Spork server. To solve this problem I released a new version of Sham (0.5.0) and made some changes to my spec_helper.rb and test.rb files. Here is what I ended up with:

Ensure your Gemfile is up to date, and update your bundle.

group :test do
  gem 'rspec-rails'
  gem 'spork'
  gem 'sham'
end

Update test.rb to ensure that you aren't caching classes when using Spork.
```
config.cache_classes = !(ENV['DRB'] == 'true')
```

Modify your spec_helper.rb file, adding the Spork.each_run block.

require 'spork'

Spork.prefork do
  ...
end

Spork.each_run do
  ActiveSupport::Dependencies.clear
  ActiveRecord::Base.instantiate_observers
  Sham::Config.activate!
end if Spork.using_spork?

You're done! Here's a complete gist of the files.

The Spork.each_run block only gets run when you are actually in the Spork DRB environment, this ensures that you aren’t unnecessarily re-loading your classes outside of Spork. The ActiveSupport::Dependencies.clear line re-loads all your models and controllers. The next line re-instantiates your observers. Finally the Sham::Config.activate! line reloads Sham so that you can easily create valid model objects. TDD/BDD in real-time is possible again!