Override behavior of “rake spec” task

Basically, I have a bunch of folders in my spec directory for a rails project:

spec/acceptance
spec/controllers
spec/fixtures
spec/helpers
spec/javascripts
spec/lib
spec/mailers
spec/models
spec/support

The spec files in my acceptance folder are my capybara/selenium tests and still in experimental phase. I don’t want them to run every time and definitely don’t want the CI server running them. However, when I run ‘rake’ or ‘rake spec’, it runs everything in my ‘spec’ folder. I want it it to run the specs in every directory except acceptance.

I discovered there is not easy way to override a rake task. Redefining the task appends to it which to me is a pretty intuitive default behavior. Apparently, dchemsky knows about this and has opened an issue with rake. I was able to piece together a solution from an old blog post by Jay Fields.

Feel free to comment if you have a better way to do it.

 
require 'rake'
require 'rspec/core/rake_task'
 
class Rake::Task
  def abandon
    @actions.clear
  end
end
Rake::Task[:spec].abandon
 
RSpec::Core::RakeTask.new(:spec) do |t|
  t.pattern = "spec/{models,views,controllers,helpers}/**/*_spec.rb"
end
 
namespace :spec do
  desc "Run the code examples in spec/acceptance"
  RSpec::Core::RakeTask.new(:acceptance => "db:test:prepare") do |t|
    t.pattern = "spec/acceptance/**/*_spec.rb"
  end
end