Unit Testing Javascript with the Rails Asset Pipeline

The Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline offers new possibilities for unit testing your Javascript/CoffeeScript assets. By making it easy to preprocess, bundle, and serve your code, Rails leaves you with very little glue to write.
Here's one strategy I've been using that offers several benefits that were previously hard to combine:

• write both code and tests in any combination of pre-processable languages, relying on Sprockets and the asset pipeline to automatically find and compile everything.
• tests can execute in the browser with a nice graphical UI.
• the exact same tests can execute from the shell with no browser. I'm using therubyracer.

I have an "app/assets/javascripts/test.js" manifest file like this:
And I have an "app/assets/javascripts/test" directory that contains Jasmine specs. All the tests defined in there will automatically be included.
To run in the browser, you just need <script type="text/javascript" src="/assets/test"></script>. But for maximum debugability, put it into an Erb template and use <%= javascript_include_tag "test" %>. That way you can call it with &debug_assets=1 to get useful filenames and line numbers in your stack traces.

To run from the shell, we can grab our source directly out of the asset pipeline and stick it into a Javascript execution environment:
Of course there are still a few more details to take care of to trigger the tests, produce nice console output, and set Rake's exit status. Here is a full example config.