Automating timecop gem for testing time-dependent Ruby code

RSpec is pretty cool. You can define arbitrary flags to toss at the end of a describe, it, context, etc., to run arbitrary code. This is super handy with timecop, a gem to mock Time.now, Date.today, and DateTime.now.

Instead of doing this:

describe '#do_a_thing' do  it 'sets thing_at as now' do    Timecop.freeze    Thing.do_a_thing    expect(Thing.thing_at).to eq Time.now    Timecop.return  endend

Put this in spec/support/timecop.rb:

RSpec.configure do |config|  config.before :each, timecop: :freeze do    Timecop.freeze  end  config.after :each, timecop: :freeze do    Timecop.return  endend

And do:

describe '#do_a_thing' do  it 'sets thing_at as now', timecop: :freeze do    Thing.do_a_thing    expect(Thing.thing_at).to eq Time.now  endend

Doesn't that look nice?