Reek-Driven Development

Reek’s own source code runs at zero smells all of the time — does yours?

rake

One way to drive quality into your code from the very beginning of a project is to run Reek as a part of your testing process. For example, you could do that by adding a Rake Task to your rakefile, which will make it easy to run Reek on all your source files whenever you need to.

require 'reek/adapters/rake_task'

Reek::RakeTask.new do |t|
  t.fail_on_error = true
  t.verbose = false
  t.source_files = 'lib/**/*.rb'
end

Now the command rake reek will run reek on your source code (and in this case, it fails if it finds any smells). For more detailed information about Reek’s integration with Rake, see Rake Task in this wiki.

reek/adapters/spec

But there’s another way; a much more effective “Reek-driven” approach: add Reek expectations directly into your Rspec specs. Here’s an example taken directly from Reek’s own source code:

it 'contains no code smells' do
  Dir['lib/**/*.rb'].should_not reek
end

By requiring reek/adapters/spec you gain access to the ‘reek’ matcher, which returns true if and only if Reek finds smells in your code. And if the test fails, the matcher produces an error message that includes details of all the smells it found.

[Credits: Ashley Moran had the original idea for should_not reek.]

assert

If you’re not yet into BDD with Rspec, you can still gain the benefits of Reek-driven development using assertions:

assert !Dir['lib/**/*.rb'].to_source.smelly?