Comments on: Timecop: Freeze Time in Ruby for Better Testing

By: John Trupiano

John Trupiano — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 14:41:24 +0000

Wow, that’s awesome Graeme!

By: Graeme Mathieson

Graeme Mathieson — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 08:48:42 +0000

Part of our system performs daily recalculations for each day between an event happening and today. It also has to be able to account for changes in tax law over the past 4 years. This combination has meant our test suite gets slower every day, since we have tests verifying correct behaviour immediately before and after tax law changes.

Refactoring it to avoid the date sensitivity is a big job, and one that we’ve been putting off for a while (though we will still get to it one day!). Incorporating Timecop took 10 minutes of dev work (most of which was identifying the hotspots) and has shaved 90 seconds (120s down to 30s) from one set of tests. Quick win! Thank you!

By: Hammed

Hammed — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:12:57 +0000

One of the most useful testing plugins for rails! cheers

By: Lewis Hoffman

Lewis Hoffman — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:50:45 +0000

Adding a notification cron job to Wagn (wagn.org) & this will be perfect for building the tests, thank you!

By: John Trupiano

John Trupiano — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 06:16:31 +0000

Hey Scott, glad Timecop is working out for you!

To all commenters (in particular anonymouse), take note that I’ve release version 0.2.0, which most importantly provides the ability to either “freeze” or “rebase” time (as opposed to only 0.1.0, which only froze time). See the blog post (http://blog.smartlogicsolutions.com/2008/12/24/timecop-2-released-freeze-and-rebase-time-ruby/) or check out the project on github: http://github.com/jtrupiano/timecop

By: Scott Moe

Scott Moe — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 19:40:18 +0000

Awesome! We’re building a site for filing sales tax and this is exactly what we need to build useful tests that will work now and a year from now.

By: John Trupiano

John Trupiano — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:23:33 +0000

Francois, Aaron, thanks for the kudos. I hope you’re finding the gem useful. It’s working very well for us on several projects.

anonymouse: time will not continue to move forward, and as you point out, this does reduce the usable scope for the gem. I would LOVE to put this feature into Timecop, but it’s not something I’ve looked into.

I imagine a usable solution would involve the following:

1) Take the new time/date from the #travel() function and store it.
2) Compute deltas (offsets) for Time.now, DateTime.now and Date.today
3) Mock Time.now, DateTime.now and Date.today to return the current time + those deltas (rather than just returning the original mock)

It sounds do-able to me, perhaps a project for a free weekend! If you feel so inclined, the project is available on github (http://github.com/jtrupiano/timecop). Otherwise, it’s certainly something to put on my to-do list.

Thanks for checking in.

By: anonymouse

anonymouse — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:17:04 +0000

So, does time still move forward after a Time.travel? That would be sweet, since some things may use time internally for benchmarking/timeouts/etc.

By: Aaron H.

Aaron H. — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:29:02 +0000

This is AWESOME. I work on several apps that have time as a key component and this is going to be SO useful. THANK YOU!

By: François Beausoleil

François Beausoleil — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:14:32 +0000

Thank you very much for that. I had started such a library, but I stopped after I coded a couple of test cases. I’ll enjoy using a good solution, instead of my half-baked one :)