Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Rails 4, Rspec not letting go of Gemfile.lock, can't Git Pull, can't checkout

Alright, this is going to be a super quick post but thought I'd let people know as this has come up a couple of times.

The environment is
  • Rails 4 or above
  • Git
  • Rspec for testing
So here's the issue. Every now and then, I try to do a Git Pull (say after a pull request has been merged) and Git won't let me because it seems my Gemfile.lock has some local changes that would be overwritten.

Easy enough, right? Just stash, or discard the changes. So I tried running 'git stash', or 'git checkout Gemfile.lock'. But then right after, I do a 'git status', and low and behold, the Gemfile.lock still has local changes. What the hell? Why isn't Git letting me stash the changes.

Well, it turns out, Git is letting me stash the changes, but very shortly after, something is changing the Gemfile.lock file right away. So right after I stash my changes, or discard, something comes right back and makes the changes again.

The culprit? Rpsec- well more specifically spring. So after running rspec, spring continues to run. As far as I understand, spring keeps your Rails environment running so you don't have to reload it on every rspec run (as far as I know, I could be way off). But the short of it is, the first time your run rspec, it fires up spring, and spring holds onto your Gemfile.lock.

So after you discard your changes, spring will apply the changes right again on Gemfile.lock (and perhaps other files).

How to solve it?

Simply stop spring by running "spring stop". At that point, you should have no issue discarding your changes using Git.

Worried about spring being stopped? Don't worry, it starts up again the next time you run rspec.

Alright, that's it for now. Hope that helps some peeps!

2 comments:

eu4 event ids said...

Nice one ! I wish you kept it up with some more follow up blogs/videos , so much more to talk about

cli23 said...

Hey eu4, I moved most of my blogging to http://www.bitesite.ca/blog - although I haven't kept it up as much. Hoping to do some more YouTube videos soon.