RSpec: Inferring spec type from file location

Shared example groups are a useful RSpec feature. Unfortunately the default directory structure generated by rspec-rails has no obvious place to put the...

While RSpec 1 and 2 decided that specs inside spec/model are model specs, and those inside spec/features are feature specs (and so on), RSpec 3 will no longer do that by default.

This will result in errors such as missing routing helpers, etc...

In a Rails application, *_spec.rb files get special treatment depending on the file's directory. E.g. when you put a spec in spec/controllers your examples will have some magic context like controller, post or get that appears out of now...

You will need to upgrade to RSpec >= 2 and rspec-rails >= 2 for Rails 3. Here are some hints to get started:

• In RSpec 2 the executable is rspec, not spec.
• RSpec and rspec-rails have been completely refactored internally. All RSpec classes...

Say we want …

• to create a Gallery that has a name and has_many :images, which in turn have a caption
• to offer the user a single form to create a gallery with any number of images
• immediate uploads with a progress bar per image
• a snapp...

Because your examples should not change global state, you should not need to care about the order in which RSpec processes your .rb files. However, in [some cases](https://makandracards.com/makandra/1281-stubbed-class-methods-in-rspec-1-remain...

If in your application your users pass along params that result in filenames, like invoices/generated?number=123. This could be your (very careless) controller method:

def generated
  send_file File.join(Rails.root, 'shared', 'invoices'...

When you need to find out in which kind of spec you are during run-time, it's definitely possible. It's a lot easier in RSpec 2+.

For example, consider this global before block where you'd want to run some code for specific specs only:

c...