How can I run Ruby tests automatically?

I have a system thats highly reliant on various web APIs. I would like to run my API specific tests at least once per day to make sure all API's are still playing nicely and alive. I have a set of unit tests (just plain rb files that test API calls for expected data) and would like to run these every 24 hours. If something breaks, I would like to take an action (e.g. email or sms me).

How best to setup automated Ruby tests and parse the result? Can I just setup a 开发者_StackOverflowcron job to handle the .rb files? How would I take an action and detect programmatically if the tests are failing? Maybe there is some kind of continuous integration solution for RUby that can handle this?

I've just gone through the process of setting up Hudson CI as my integration server, using this amazing tutorial from Dr. Nic. It installs through a gem, coming pretty much preconfigured, and was extremely simple to get working.

I'm using rspec and cucumber, and Hudson runs all tests when it sees a new commit on my git repository. If all tests pass, it merges the code into my master branch. If any test fails, it holds its horses and sends me an email.

EDIT:

I also want to give ten thumbs up to the ChuckNorris plugin for Hudson. Agile doesn't get better than pair programming with Walker, Texas Ranger.

Ruby has Test::Unit built-in, RSpec, ZenTest, shoulda, cucumber and probably many more tools to help test. Being built-in, Test::Unit is used a lot and is the target to be beaten by the other tools.

ZenTest and RSpec can do continuous testing: You make a change and save a file and they'll see it and run the test suite. I like that because then I know the state of things right away.

I haven't used cucumber, but have used the rest. I heard cucumber's emphasis is on integration testing but that might have been the commenter's feelings rather than by design of the developers. The list of tutorials for cucumber is interesting browsing. In particular there's webrat: Automated Acceptance Testing with RSpec or Cucumber.

Any of these could be wired up with cron to run periodically; Just treat them as you would any other set of command-line apps.

It should be easy to tie in web-testing too, but you'll have to identify the gems/modules needed and write the glue code. I haven't had need for such a beast as I'd go at it using Mechanize and/or one of the other HTTP gems plus Nokogiri to ransack the pages.