Configure Spec Task Without Verbose Output

published 01/12/26

My Ruby projects use the default Rake task to run linting and the test suite plus anything else that might gate the merging of a PR. These days that is Standard Ruby and good old RSpec but I sometimes add other things too. Like this site includes a step of ensuring Jekyll builds the site correctly.

Here's what this looks like for my cli project called mli:

To set this up I have Rakefile that looks like this:

require "bundler/gem_tasks"
require "rspec/core/rake_task"
require "standard/rake"

RSpec::Core::RakeTask.new(:spec)

task default: %i[standard spec]

There's not too much here just some requires so things are available and then I setup the default task to run Standard Ruby and RSpec in that order.

But did you notice that noise in the output? I hate it when there is noise in my default Rake task. My goal is to eliminate anything that is not green dots. I recently learned that you can silence some of that RSpec output like this:

RSpec::Core::RakeTask.new(:spec) { |t| t.verbose = false }

Updating my Rakefile with that verbose attribute set to false and now the output looks like this:

Then I wondered why or where this comes from and so I did a little digging. I ended up finding the source code for RSpec::Core::RakeTask and sure enough there is the explanation:

# Use verbose output. If this is set to true, the task will print the
# executed spec command to stdout. Defaults to `true`.
attr_accessor :verbose

I'm still a bit puzzled by this choice. Seems like verbose output should be disabled by default but at least now I know why and how to turn it off.