Why Ruby is great as a “sticky” test framework

One great advantage of developing a test framework in a scripting language like Ruby is that it allows you to glue together different types of tests in a single framework. 

Here’s a perfect example.

I had to write a test checking all the log files in a directory structure for a text string (in this case, a password).  In other words, I wanted to make sure the password wasn’t stored in plain text anywhere in the log files.  I found that Powershell has some awesome tools for doing this type of search on a Windows machine.  So, I wrote a Powershell script to search the directory, and if a match is found, it creates a “fail.txt” file:

if (test-path fail.txt)
{
    del fail.txt
}

$adminSearch = dir -rec -filter *.log 'c:\windows\temp' |
select-string "PASSWORD=thisisthepassword"
if (!$adminSearch)
{
    Write-Output("pass")
}
else
{
    Write-Output("fail")
    Write-Output([string]$adminSearch.count + " instances of passwords in log files: ") |
        out-file -encoding ASCII -filepath fail.txt
    Write-Output($adminSearch) | out-file -append -noclobber -encoding ASCII -filepath fail.txt
}

This done, I then write a Ruby/RSpec script that simply checks for the existence of the fail.txt file:

require 'spec'

describe "Information Disclosure Prevention" do

  it "Should not show passwords in plain text" do
    system("powershell.exe -File ./lib/passwordsearch.ps1 -command \"& {set-executionpolicy unrestricted}\"")
    result = FileTest.exists?("fail.txt")
    result.should == false
  end
end

And that’s it.  As you can see, it’s easy to wrap RSpec examples inside any command/script that can be run from the command line.