Exercism Ruby Track

Exercism Exercises in Ruby

Table of Contents

• Setup
• Anatomy of an Exercise
  • Canonical Data
• Running the Tests
• Pull Requests
  • Style Guide
• READMEs
• Contributing Guide
• Ruby icon

Setup

You'll need a recent (2.6+) version of Ruby, but that's it. Minitest ships with the language, so you're all set.

Anatomy of an Exercise

The files for an exercise live in exercises/<slug>. The slug for an exercise is a unique nickname composed of a-z (lowercase) and -, e.g. clock or atbash-cipher. Inside its directory, each exercise has:

• a test suite, <exercise_name>_test.rb
• an example solution, .meta/solutions/<exercise_name>.rb

where <exercise_name> is the underscored version of the exercise's slug, e.g., clock or atbash_cipher.

If the exercise has a test generator, the directory will also contain:

• the test generator, .meta/generator/<exercise_name>_case.rb

A few exercises use a custom test template:

• .meta/generator/test_template.erb

Canonical Data

Most exercises can be generated from shared inputs/outputs, called canonical data (see Generated Test Suites below). To find out whether a test has canonical data, check the problem-specifications repo.

Running the Tests

Run the tests using rake, rather than ruby path/to/the_test.rb. rake knows to look for the example solution and to disable skips. Just tell rake the name of your problem and you are set:

rake test:clock

To pass arguments to the test command, like -p for example, you can run the following:

rake test:clock -- -p

To run a subset of the tests, use a regular expression. For example, if tests exist that are named identical_to_4_places, and identical, then we can run both tests with

rake test:hamming -- -p -n="/identical/"

Note that flags which have an attached value, like above, must take the form -flag=value and if value has spaces -flag="value with spaces".

Pull Requests

We welcome pull requests that provide fixes to existing test suites (missing tests, interesting edge cases, improved APIs), as well as new problems.

If you're unsure, then go ahead and open a GitHub issue, and we'll discuss the change.

Please submit changes to a single problem per pull request unless you're submitting a general change across many of the problems (e.g. formatting).

You can run (some) of the same checks that we run by running the following tool in your terminal:

bin/local-status-check

If you would like to have these run right before you push your commits, you can activate the hook by running this tool in your terminal:

bin/setup-git-hoooks

Thank you so much for contributing! ✨

Style Guide

We have created a minimal set of guidelines for the testing files, which you can take advantage of by installing the rubocop gem. It will use the configuration file located in the root folder, .rubocop.yml. When you edit your code, you can simply run rubocop -D. It will ignore your example solution, but will gently suggest style for your test code.

The -D option that is suggested is provided to give you the ability to easily ignore the Cops that you think should be ignored. This is easily done by doing # rubocop:disable CopName, where the CopName is replaced appropriately.

For more complete information, see Rubocop.

While lib/generator/exercise_case.rb provides helper functions as discussed above, it remains the responsibility of an exercise's generator to interpret its canonical-data.json data in a stylistically correct manner, e.g. converting string indices to integer indices.

READMEs

All exercises must have a README.md file, but should not be created manually. The READMEs are constructed using shared metadata, which lives in the problem-specifications repo.

Use the configlet tool to generate a README from shared metadata:

1. Clone the problem-specifications repo into an adjacent directory.
2. Fetch the configlet appropriate for your system: bin/fetch-configlet
3. Generate the readme for a particular exercise: bin/configlet generate . --only rotational-cipher

Contributing Guide

If adding a new exercise:

• a generator should be implemented.
• a minimal, partial, solution should be able to be pushed, in order to create a WIP pull request.

For an in-depth discussion of how exercism language tracks and exercises work, please see the [contributing guide][contributing guide].

If you're just getting started and looking for a helpful way to get involved, take a look at regenerating the test suites, porting an exercise from another language, or creating an automated test generator.

We are also available at our community forum: building-exercism

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The Ruby icon is the Vienna.rb logo, and is used with permission. Thanks Floor Dress :)