Technical Pickles

Shoulda has long been available as a plugin. It's core was yanked out at some point, and made available as a gem. Unfortunately, the codebases diverged, with main development occurring in the plugin.

What was once was divided is now united, as of this day. Shoulda 2.0.0. Check it:

$ gem install thoughtbot-shoulda

Nothing new there, but you can use this gem in a Rails app:

# in config/environment.rb
Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  config.gem 'thoughtbot-shoulda', :lib => 'shoulda/rails', :source => 'http://gems.github.com'
end

Using gems instead of plugins isn't perfect though, specifically, rake tasks don't get loaded yet. Hopefully that will be fixed eventually, but in the mean time, you can do:

# in Rakefile
begin require 'shoulda/tasks' rescue LoadError end

You can also use this gem in any non-Rails app. In your test_helper.rb, you'd just do something like:

require 'shoulda'

So what else is new? I'm not sure exactly what was in the last release, so I'll leave that for a more official announcement.