In my previous post I mentioned an awesome gem for building CLI tools. A CLI tool’s User Interface is through stdout and stderr, but how do you test that in RSpec? My initial thought was to capture stdout/stderr by setting $stdout and $stderr to a spy and inspecting the output.

Before I did that, I thought I’d do a quick search to see if the RSpec developers had already thought of this and provided matchers for this use case. Sure enough, RSpec includes an output matcher. Here’s a quick example what it might look like to use it.

describe Cli::App do
  it 'should output to stdout' do
    expect { puts 'Hello, world!' }.to output(/world/).to_stdout
  end
 
  it 'should output to stderr' do
    expect { warn 'Explosion!' }.to output("Explosion!\n").to_stderr
  end
end

Once again, with the magic of RSpec, my tests are cleaner and more English like. Thanks RSpec!