Unit Tests | Ruby#

Warning “circular require considered harmful”#

info

This problem seems to only shows up if you use ruby -w to run a given program.

Sometimes while practicing and writing algorithms, we write the unit tests and code in the same file (as we do with the HtDP teaching languages).

Something like this:

#
# add.rb
#

##
# $ gem install rspec 
# $ rspec add.rb
##
require 'rspec'

def add(x, y)
  x + y
end

describe 'add()' do
  it 'should add x and y' do
    expect(add(-1, 1)).to eq 0
  end
end

This is OK and works well. Except if we then try to include the add.rb module into another module because you want to reuse the add() method, then we might get strange warnings with ruby -w:

#
# sum_arr.rb
#
require 'awesome_print'
require_relative './add'
$ ruby -w sum-arr.rb

warning: loading in progress, circular require considered harmful

Note that sum_arr.rb does nothing but to require the two other files. In this case, it seems something doesn’t go along well between awesome_print and add.rb importing rspec. Not requiring awesome_print in sum_arr.rb or not requiring rspec in add.rb causes the warning to cease.