Start ruby debugger if rspec test fails

Question

Often, when a test fails, I spend quite sometime trying to figure out the what caused it to fail. It\'d be useful if RSpec could kick off a Ruby debugger when the test fails, so

Answer 1

You won't get access to local variables (easily) without debugger being in scope of the block, however RSpec provides you with around hooks which let's you do this:

config.around(:each) do |example|
  result = example.run
  debugger if result.is_a?(Exception)
  puts "Debugging enabled"
end

You then have access to @ivars and subject / let(:var) contents at this point.