RSpec --next-failure

I recently discovered RSpec’s --only-failures feature after seeing Increase Your Quality of Life: An RSpec Primer. I thought I was being clever to combine it with --fail-fast — allowing me to methodically step through failures one at a time — only to discover that the RSpec team already has this covered with the --next-failure option and that they’ve both been available since 2015.

To enable these features example status persistence must be configured in spec/spec_helper.rb (remember to add the path to your .gitignore):

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.example_status_persistence_file_path = "spec/examples.txt"
end

Now rspec --only-failures and rspec --next-failure will work as advertised. They can also be combined with an additional path filter and so will work with an entire directory, a single file, or any other RSpec path filter:

rspec --next-failure
rspec --next-failure spec/system
rspec --next-failure spec/models/foo_spec.rb
rspec --next-failure spec/models/foo_spec.rb[1:2]

These RSpec nuggets have made me much more efficient when encountering a large swathes of failing tests, it makes me wonder of what else I’m unaware.