I’m on a bit of an RSpec TIL bonanza, primary because I’m taking the time to dig into the RSpec documentation and see what it has to offer.

One of my favourite assertion libraries from the Java world, that a coworker turned me onto a couple of years ago, is AssertJ. One of the nicest features in AssertJ was the ability to easily chain assertions off one expectation.

assertThat(fellowshipOfTheRing).hasSize(9)
                               .contains(frodo, sam)
                               .doesNotContain(sauron);

While writing the aforementioned CLI tool, I wanted to test that it output to both stdout and stderr. I started to wonder if there’s a way to do this Java “builder” chaining in RSpec. I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but of course the RSpec developers have already thought of this. In the RSpec world they’re called Compound Matchers and they look something like this:

require 'rspec'

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

Now I can have the fluid chained assertions in RSpec that I’ve come to expect from AssertJ 🎊✨