It was when I for the umptenth time broke another unit test in script.aculo.us that I decided that it just had to be enough! We need continuous integration for these buggered JavaScript unit tests.

Rake to the rescue!

After some hacking around on the ferry to work I had the solution!

desc "Runs all the JavaScript unit tests and collects the results"
JavaScriptTestTask.new(:unittest) do |t|
  t.mount("/lib")
  t.mount("/src")
  t.mount("/test")
  
  t.run("/test/unit/unittest_test.html")
  t.run("/test/unit/ajax_inplaceeditor_test.html")
  t.run("/test/unit/string_test.html")
  t.run("/test/unit/builder_test.html")
  
  t.browser(:safari)
  t.browser(:firefox)
end

This will start a WEBRick server with the specified files mounted, run all the combinations of browsers and tests and report back the results:

beatrix:~/Projects/rails/spinoffs/scriptaculous tirsen$ rake unittest
(in /Users/tirsen/Projects/rails/spinoffs/scriptaculous)
/test/unit/unittest_test.html on Safari: FAILURE
/test/unit/ajax_inplaceeditor_test.html on Safari: ERROR
/test/unit/string_test.html on Safari: SUCCESS
/test/unit/builder_test.html on Safari: FAILURE
/test/unit/unittest_test.html on Firefox: SUCCESS
/test/unit/ajax_inplaceeditor_test.html on Firefox: SUCCESS
/test/unit/string_test.html on Firefox: SUCCESS
/test/unit/builder_test.html on Firefox: SUCCESS

Coming to a script.aculo.us SVN repository near you soon!

(Caveat: Only works on the Mac at the moment. Maybe it's time to switch like the rest of the world.)