difference in rspec behavior when no arguments provided

[Artie]

Hello!

Maybe somebody with more experience can see what's up with the different invocations of rspec? 

I set up a new Rails app environment and noticed that when I run `rspec` alone on the command like I get a complaint from rails active_support:

   active_support/dependencies.rb cannot load such a file -- watir (LoadError)

for which, in the traceback, line 3 of watir_smoketest_spec.rb is specified as the culprit:

    require 'watir'

Yet, when I turn rspec with a argument: 

   `rspec spec/features/watir_smoketest_spec.rb`

Watir is found and browser windows start popping up, executing the code stored in 'spec/features/watir_smoketest_spec.rb'; which is the example Google search from the Watir home page.

Why is there such a striking difference in behavior? What can I learn from this?  

What article/doc should I be reading? :)

Thank you for reading and wanting to help.

--az

[Myron Marston]

The only difference between rspec and rspec path/to/file is that rspec loads all files matching the default pattern (spec/**/*_spec.rb) where as rspec path/to/file loads only the specified file. I suspect that when you run rspec path/to/file you might not be using bundler to manage and isolate your load path, whereas raw rspec is probably booting rails and loading using bundler. If watir is installed as a system gem but is not in your bundle then this behavior would make sense.

HTH,
Myron

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[Artie]

That is exactly correct. This is great. :)

The behavior went away after I simply added an entry for the Watir gem to Gemfile and ran bundler. 

Thank you, Myron, for the bright light you cast! I owe you a dinner and beverage! 

A little more Rails knowledge seems to go a long way and makes everything better.

BTW, is the IRC channel, #rspec, alive on freenode, or elsewhere?

thx!

az