Recommended way to build ruby c-extension for testing

Question

I was building a rubygem by using

gem build $gemname.gemspec && gem install $gemname-0.0.1.gem

However, this doesn't seem to be the best way to test the gem, since it moves it out of the local environment and into the rubygems paths.

Is the recommendation to build the gem using

cd ext/$gemname && ruby extconf.rb && make

? Or is there a better practice?

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 05 '12 at 22:41

I'm guessing a Rakefile like the below will also work (and is easier than the commands above). However, it's not obvious that this is necessary for testing.

require 'rake/testtask'
require 'rake/clean'

NAME = 'hola'

# rule to build the extension: this says
# that the extension should be rebuilt
# after any change to the files in ext
file "lib/#{NAME}/#{NAME}.so" =>
    Dir.glob("ext/#{NAME}/*{.rb,.c}") do
  Dir.chdir("ext/#{NAME}") do
    # this does essentially the same thing
    # as what RubyGems does
    ruby "extconf.rb"
    sh "make"
  end
  cp "ext/#{NAME}/#{NAME}.so", "lib/#{NAME}"
end

# make the :test task depend on the shared
# object, so it will be built automatically
# before running the tests
task :test => "lib/#{NAME}/#{NAME}.so"

# use 'rake clean' and 'rake clobber' to
# easily delete generated files
CLEAN.include('ext/**/*{.o,.log,.so}')
CLEAN.include('ext/**/Makefile')
CLOBBER.include('lib/**/*.so')

# the same as before
Rake::TestTask.new do |t|
  t.libs << 'test'
end

desc "Run tests"
task :default => :test

Recommended way to build ruby c-extension for testing

1 Answers1