ruby - How do I run only specific tests in Rspec?

Question

I think there's a way to run only tests with a given label. Anybody know?

Answer 1

It isn't easy to find the documentation, but you can tag examples with a hash. Eg.

# spec/my_spec.rb
describe SomeContext do
  it "won't run this" do
    raise "never reached"
  end

  it "will run this", :focus => true do
    1.should == 1
  end
end

$ rspec --tag focus spec/my_spec.rb

More info on GitHub. (anyone with a better link, please advise)

(update)

RSpec is now superbly documented here. See the --tag option section for details.

As of v2.6 this kind of tag can be expressed even more simply by including the configuration option treat_symbols_as_metadata_keys_with_true_values, which allows you to do:

describe "Awesome feature", :awesome do

where :awesome is treated as if it were :awesome => true.

Also see this answer for how to configure RSpec to automatically run 'focused' tests. This works especially well with Guard.