One of my favorite testing/productivity tools: guard

guard is not a new library. It has been a staple in many areas of Ruby development for years. Many of us use it, but I felt like shedding a bit of light on it as a great too folks should know about in general.

guard / guard

Guard is a command line tool to easily handle events on file system modifications.

Guard

Guard automates various tasks by running custom rules whenever file or directories are modified

It's frequently used by software developers, web designers, writers and other specialists to avoid mundane, repetitive actions and commands such as "relaunching" tools after changing source files or configurations.

Common use cases include: an IDE replacement, web development tools, designing "smart" and "responsive" build systems/workflows, automating various project tasks and installing/monitoring various system services.

For a full categorized list of known Guard plugins, look here: https://github.com/guard/guard/wiki/Guard-Plugins

If you have any questions about Guard or want to share some information with the Guard community, please go to one of the following places:

Guard Wiki
Google group.
StackOverflow.
IRC channel #guard (irc.freenode.net) for chatting.

Before you file an issue, make sure you have read the known issues and file an issue sections that contains some important information.

Features

File system changes handled by our awesome…

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Guard automates various tasks by running custom rules whenever file or directories are modified.

At DEV, we use guard to run tests as files are saved in order to optimize our test-driven-development practices.

I say "we" and "our" without total certainty that it is used across the team and among contributors because it is not needed in our flow. This is probably one of the better things about its use with rspec. It is the cherry on top.

It's not a heavy-handed default, but so engrained in my own workflow, I almost forget it's not the default.

The gem is most popular in conjunction with Rails and testing, but I'd advise folks to check out its usefulness in any situation where saving a file can kick off a task. The guard ecosystem is vast.

Are there similar tools in other language environments folks check out?