How Testing Rails App with Rspec and Capybara
Capybara is a web-based test automation software that runs
test for user stories operate web application testing for behavior-driven software development. Written in the Ruby programming language.
Capybara can mimic the actions of real users interacting with web-based applications. It can receive pages, parse the HTML and submit forms.
Benefits
Setup is not necessary for Rails and Rack applications. Works out of the box.
Intuitive API mimics the language an actual user would use.
Works in the backend to run your test fast headless mode to an actual browser with no changes to your tests.
Powerful synchronization features mean you never
have to wait for asynchronous processes to complete.
Setting Up
In your gem file add this gem
group :test do
gem ‘capybara’
gem ‘rspec’
gem ‘rspec-rails’
end
Then bundle install
While testing the Rails app, add this line to your test helper file:
require ‘capybara/rails’
require ‘capybara/rspec’
Put your Capybara specs in spec/features or
if you have your Capybara specs in a different directory,
then tag the example groups with type: :feature depending on which type of test you’re writing.
For example to test a file User, you can type this to your terminal to generate the spec file
Rails g rspec:features users
Its create `spec/features/users_spec.rb`
Navigate to the spec file to the file generated to see the file spec/features/users_spec.rb
Require “rails_helper”
Spec/features/user_spec.rb
Rspec.feature “Users” type: :feature do
Pending ”add some examples to (or delete) #{__FILE__}”
end
So you can start to write your test for example
describe “Users”, type: :feature do
it “create new user” do
visit ‘/sessions/new’
within(“#session”) do
fill_in ‘name’, with: ‘taiwo’
fill_in ‘Password’, with: ‘password’
end
click_button ‘Sign in’
expect(page).to have_content ‘Success’
end
Then you can test your code by running rspec on the terminal
The beauty of capybara is that you can even test for a specific line
Take for example
You can type
Respec spec/features.users_spec.rb:5
It will only test for the line specified.
Conclusion
Using caybara with rspec makes testing
of rails app easier to setup for testing with efficient results
Capybara helps you test web applications by simulating
how a real user would interact with your app.
Summary
Create Acceptance Tests or Feature Tests to extend your automated tests with browser testing. It can help tests some areas that cannot be accessible with other types of tests.
