How can I play sound on rspec success/failure when using guard

Question

I had it configured once with autotest, but lately I'm using guard-rspec to run my specs in the background. I do have growl notifications but this requires reading the actual notification text which is a distraction during a fast red-green cycle. I would prefer a sound notification for success and failure, but I can't find any ready-to-use example of such a setup.

Answer 1

I also haven't seen a such example setup, so you need to implement a Notifier:

module Guard::Notifier::Sound
  extend self

  def available?(silent = false, options = {})
    true
  end

  def notify(type, title, message, image, options = { })
    puts 'Play sound: ', type
  end
end

You can place this code directly into your Guardfile, register and make use of it with the following code:

Guard::Notifier::NOTIFIERS << [[:sound, ::Guard::Notifier::Sound]]
notification :sound

Of course you need to implement the actual sound playing. A simple implementation would be to fork to an external player like:

def notify(type, title, message, image, options = { })
  fork{ exec 'mpg123','-q',"spec/support/sound/#{ type }.mp3" }
end

Update

With Spork the above direct inclusion into the Guardfile will not work, because Spork runs in a separate process and will not evaluate it. You need to create a supporting file, e.g. spec/support/sound_notifier.rb with a content like this:

module Guard::Notifier::Sound
  extend self

  def available?(silent = false, options = {})
    true
  end

  def notify(type, title, message, image, options = { })
    fork{ exec 'mpg123','-q',"spec/support/sound/#{ type }.mp3" }
  end
end

Guard::Notifier::NOTIFIERS << [[:sound, ::Guard::Notifier::Sound]]

and having just

require 'spec/support/sound_notifier'
notification :sound

in the Guardfile. Next you need to load the sound_notifier also in the Spork process. Since I do not use Spork I cannot verify it, but when I remember correctly happens in the spec_helper.rb:

Spork.prefork do
  require 'spec/support/sound_notifier'
end