RSpec and TextMate
Ever since I upgraded to Leopard my wonderful RSpec TextMate bundle simply stopped working. This may not have been a result of the Leopard upgrade per se, but things went seriously south about the same time. Between the day after Leopard was released and now I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to figure just what went wrong. Finally, last night, I capped off several weeks of frustrating exploration by getting the damn bundle working again.
My big “A-Ha” moment was figuring out that there are, apparently, two RSpec bundles for TextMate. One is hosted at RubyForge by the rspec guys and another that is hosted at Macromates. I had installed the one from RubyForge which gave me a host of odd errors. When I finally realized that there were two parallel projects and I installed the Macromates one, I was back in business. Also, another problem that I think I had was upgrading to the latest rspec version (1.0.8), though downgrading didn’t seem to help.
So to get this working I first had to troll around for any existing RSpec bundles that I had installed. All of the HOWTOs I read had me install the bundle (via subversion) into ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles. My original RSpec bundle wasn’t there but was installed in ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Pristine Copy/Bundles. Another location to check for is /Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles (note the lack of ‘~’).
RubyGems and RDoc
My other outstanding irritant in the post-Leopard world was the sudden disappearance of the RDoc of the gems I’ve installed from my beloved gem_server. I love the ri command and use it extensively, but being able to search around and expand the source from within a browser is extremely useful for me. For example, I’m still in the process of gaining fluency with RSpec and to be able to browse around to see what’s available is absolutely crucial to any kind of productivity while I’m still in a steep learning curve.
After trolling around it appears that once you’ve taken the step to upgrade RubyGems (the dreaded sudo gem update --system) it’s all about setting up the GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH variables. There seem to be a couple of ways to do this: you can set this up in the shell configuration file of your choice (e.g. ~/.bashrc for bash users, ~/.zshrc for zsh users, etc.) and/or you can do this (on Mac) by entering these in the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist.
My environment.plist looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<dict>
...
<string>/opt/local/lib/libtidy</string>
<key>GEM_HOME</key>
<string>/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8</string>
<key>GEM_PATH</key>
<string>/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8</string>
</dict>
</plist>