Check that my own importer works locally, on my machine

[nicktmro]

Hi all,

I am not a ruby dev so please keep that in mind.

TL;DR
How can I check that a plugin I wrote actually does what I want it to do? How can invoke or run in Terminal / Console the jekyll-import and pass as a parameter my new importer?

Details
I want to extend the behaviour of the RSS importer. I manually edited the /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.3.0/gems/jekyll-import-0.18.1/lib/jekyll-import/importers/rss.rb file and saved my changes and it definitely does what I want it to do.

Now this is obviously more than hacky, so I'd like to create a plugin that does what I want it to do (rss_podcast). I followed the instructions on the Contributing page on the jekyll-import website but I cannot find a script/console command anywhere to check that the plugin I wrote actually works alongside the other plugins.

Thanks a bunch!

[ashmaroli]

Couple of stuff:

• Never make changes to files within an existing gem. Its not easy to keep track of the bugs you may introduce and forget.
• Clone this repository and make your changes in that clone.
• There is no script/console. (The documentation needs updating..)
• Since your importer is based on an existing importer, you can simply inherit your importer from the existing one:

  # New importer in a new file:
  # lib/jekyll-import/importers/rss_podcast.rb
  module JekyllImport
    module Importers
      class RSSPodcast < RSS
        # add just those methods (entire definition) that are being changed
      end
    end
  end

• Then test it as documented at https://import.jekyllrb.com/docs/rss/ replacing the RSS Importer with yours.

[nicktmro]

Thanks for the reply, @ashmaroli. I agree that what I did is super bad, which is why I came to ask for help.

Can you please describe / share the command I need to issue in order to run my extension of the importer?

Like I said, I'm not a ruby dev, but I thought that running the command from the link you shared would ignore my local changes and would not fail to find the rss_podcast.rb file in the path?

Basically, what do I need to run instead of this (how can i specify the path to my local implementation?):

$ ruby -r rubygems -e 'require "jekyll-import";
    JekyllImport::Importers::RSSPodcast.run({
      "source" => "my_file.xml"
    })'

[ashmaroli]

Running Ruby with -I will let you set the $LOAD_PATH:

$ ruby -I lib -r rubygems -e 'require "jekyll-import";
    JekyllImport::Importers::RSSPodcast.run({
      "source" => "my_file.xml"
    })'

Alternatively, paste the code into a fresh file and run it directly:

# ./run_importer.rb

$LOAD_PATH.unshift(File.expand_path('lib', __dir__))
require 'jekyll-import'

JekyllImport::Importers::RSSPodcast.run(
  "source" => ARGV[0] || 'my_file.xml'
)

$ ruby ./run_importer.rb my_backup.xml

[nicktmro]

This worked great. Thank you!

ruby -I lib -r rubygems -e 'require "jekyll-import";
JekyllImport::Importers::RSSPodcast.run({
"source" => "my_file.xml"
})'