Webrat doesn't follow redirect because it considers the url external

Rails doesn't know which host it is running on. For generating links, it strips the hostname off the request URL, which can lead to errors when you have absolute URLs in your Cucumber tests.

If you really need to use absolute URLs somewhere, say in an email you send, either throw away the host when parsing it (e.g. body.scan(/http:\/\/[^\/]+\/([^\s"<]+)/)) or tell Webrat you're back on your site.