How do I stub things in MiniTest?

Within my test I want to stub a canned response for any instance of a class.

It might look like something like:

Book.stubs(:title).any_instance().returns("War and Peace")

Then whenever I call @book.title it returns "War and Peace".

Is there a way to do this within MiniTest? If yes, can you give me an example code snippet?

Or do I need something like mocha?

MiniTest does support Mocks but Mocks are overkill for what I need.

  # Create a mock object
  book = MiniTest::Mock.new
  # Set the mock to expect :title, return "War and Piece"
  # (note that unless we call book.verify, minitest will
  # not check that :title was called)
  book.expect :title, "War and Piece"

  # Stub Book.new to return the mock object
  # (only within the scope of the block)
  Book.stub :new, book do
    wp = Book.new # returns the mock object
    wp.title      # => "War and Piece"
  end

I use minitest for all my Gems testing, but do all my stubs with mocha, it might be possible to do all in minitest with Mocks(there is no stubs or anything else, but mocks are pretty powerful), but I find mocha does a great job, if it helps:

require 'mocha'    
Books.any_instance.stubs(:title).returns("War and Peace")

If you're interesting in simple stubbing without a mocking library, then it's easy enough to do this in Ruby:

class Book
  def avg_word_count_per_page
    arr = word_counts_per_page
    sum = arr.inject(0) { |s,n| s += n }
    len = arr.size
    sum.to_f / len
  end

  def word_counts_per_page
    # ... perhaps this is super time-consuming ...
  end
end

describe Book do
  describe '#avg_word_count_per_page' do
    it "returns the right thing" do
      book = Book.new
      # a stub is just a redefinition of the method, nothing more
      def book.word_counts_per_page; [1, 3, 5, 4, 8]; end
      book.avg_word_count_per_page.must_equal 4.2
    end
  end
end

If you want something more complicated like stubbing all instances of a class, then it is also easy enough to do, you just have to get a little creative:

class Book
  def self.find_all_short_and_unread
    repo = BookRepository.new
    repo.find_all_short_and_unread
  end
end

describe Book do
  describe '.find_all_short_unread' do
    before do
      # exploit Ruby's constant lookup mechanism
      # when BookRepository is referenced in Book.find_all_short_and_unread
      # then this class will be used instead of the real BookRepository
      Book.send(:const_set, BookRepository, fake_book_repository_class)
    end

    after do
      # clean up after ourselves so future tests will not be affected
      Book.send(:remove_const, :BookRepository)
    end

    let(:fake_book_repository_class) do
      Class.new(BookRepository)
    end

    it "returns the right thing" do 
      # Stub #initialize instead of .new so we have access to the
      # BookRepository instance
      fake_book_repository_class.send(:define_method, :initialize) do
        super
        def self.find_all_short_and_unread; [:book1, :book2]; end
      end
      Book.find_all_short_and_unread.must_equal [:book1, :book2]
    end
  end
end