The ActionDispatch module of Rails gives you the helper method flash to access the flash messages in a response.

describe PostsController, type: :request do

  describe 'update' do

    it 'shows a success message on update' do
      post_record = create(:post)

      put "/posts/#{post_record.id}"

      # Same as @request.flash[:alert]
      expect(flash[:alert]).to eq('Post updated successfully.')
    end

  end


end

We prefer to run our end-to-end tests with headless Chrome. While it's a very stable solution overall, we sometimes see the headless Chrome process freeze (or the Capybara driver losing connection, we're not sure).

The effect is that your test suite suddenly stops progressing without an error. You will eventually see an error after a long timeout but until then it will seem that your suite is frozen. If you're also using [capybara-screenshot](https:/...

We currently test most of our gems on Travis CI, but want to migrate those tests to Github Actions. This is a step-by-step guide on how to do this.

Note that this guide requires the gem to use gemika.

1. Go to a new "ci" branch:

   git checkout -b ci
   

2. Update gemika to version >= 0.5.0 in all your Gemfiles.
3. Have gemika generate a Github Actions workflow definition by running

   mkdir -p .github/workflows; bundle exec rake gemika:generate_github_actions_workflow > .github/workf...
   

When your cucumber features grow massively over time, the test execution can take a lot of time.
One easy way to speed up your test execution is to use the parallel_tests gem.
It comes along with some useful rake tasks that let you setup your local test environment shortly to run your features, specs or unit-tests in parallel.

Follow these steps to get it to work.

1. Add the parallel_tests gem to your Gemfile test sections like that:

   # ./Gemfile
   
   group :development, :test do
   

...

We recently noticed issues with Chrome 75+ when having the w3c option enabled within the Selenium webdriver. It looks like recent Selenium versions don't have any issues with the w3c interface anymore. And starting with Chrome 91 this fix might cause unexpected issues, so you should try to enabled this option again or just remove the following line from you configuration:

options.add_option('w3c', false)

Background: Setting the w3c option t...

Jasmine has spyOnProperty(), but it only works if the property is implemented using getter and setter functions. This is a known limitation of Jasmine.

If the mocked property is a simple value, it will not work:

const x = { foo: 1 }
console.log(x.foo) // 1
spyOnProperty(x, 'foo').and.returnValue(2)
// Throws: Error: <spyOnProperty> : Property foo does not have access type get

Below you can find a function `spyOnValuePr...

A print stylesheet is easy to create. Choose a font suited for paper, hide some elements, done. Unfortunately print stylesheets often break as the application is developed further, because they are quickly forgotten and nobody bothers to check if their change breaks the print stylesheet.

This card describes how to write a simple Cucumber feature that tests some aspects of a print stylesheets. This way, the requirement of having a print stylesheet is manifested in your tests and cannot be inadvertedly removed from the code. Note that you can...

If your rails application is unable to send mails, it might be useful to debug your settings using the rails console. Here is a snippet that shows the current settings and lets you send a test mail directly from the console:

mailer = ActionMailer::Base.new

# check settings:
mailer.delivery_method # -> :smtp
mailer.smtp_settings # -> { address: "localhost", port: 25, domain: "localhost.localdomain", user_name: nil, password: nil, authentication: nil, enable_starttls_auto: true }

# send mail:
mailer.mail(from: 'sender@example.com', ...

To run a single test file:

rake test:units TEST=test/unit/post_test.rb
rake test:functionals TEST=test/functional/posts_controller_test.rb
rake test:integration TEST=test/integration/admin_news_posts_test.rb

You may even run a single test method:

ruby -I test test/unit/post_test.rb -n "name of the test"
ruby -I test test/functional/posts_controller_test.rb -n test_name_of_the_test # underscored, prefixed with 'test_'

Or all tests matching a regular expression:

ruby -I test test/integration/admin_news_posts_test.r...

With puma you can have concurrent requests. There are two concepts on how Puma can handle two incoming requests: Workers and Threads.

Workers

Puma can have multiple workers. Each worker is a process fork from puma and therefore a very heavy instance and can have multiple threads, that handle the incoming requests.

Example: A Puma server with 2 workers and 1 thread each can handle 2 request in parallel. A third request has to wait until the thread of one of the workers is free.

Threads

Rails is thread-safe since version 4 (n...

Generate a password

htpasswd -Bn firstname.lastname

This will ask you for a password and use bcrypt (-B, more secure) and print the output to stdout (-n).

Check if password matches the hash

You'll first have to write the password hash to a file:

echo firstname.lastname:$2y$05$4JXxd2GM/J2...9c3KJmFS > htpass_test

Check, if it is correct:

htpasswd -v htpass_test firstname.lastname

You probably should not use the -b switch to read the password from the command line as the password will then be visible...

Geordi uses parallel_tests if available for running the test suite. To debug an application it is very unhandy to have multiple processes as your terminal I/O will not work as expected once a breakpoint is hit.

Even parallel_tests support an option to enable a single process run, it is not possible to pass this option through geordi. But you can set the number of processes via ENV variable manually:

PARALLEL_TEST_PROCESSORS=1 bundle exec geordi cucu...

You can use these step definitions:

Then /^I should not see an error$/ do
  (200 .. 399).should include(page.status_code)
end

Then /^I should see an error$/ do
  (400 .. 599).should include(page.status_code)
end

Note that you need to tag the scenario with @allow-rescue to test that an error is shown like this

@allow-rescue
Scenario: Accessing the admin area requires a login
  When I go to the admin area
  Then I should see an error

These step definitions will not work for @javascript scena...

Capybara drivers will usually delete all cookies after each scenario. If you need to lose cookie data in the middle of a scenario, you can do this:

browser = Capybara.current_session.driver.browser
if browser.respond_to?(:clear_cookies)
  # Rack::MockSession
  browser.clear_cookies
elsif browser.respond_to?(:manage) and browser.manage.respond_to?(:delete_all_cookies)
  # Selenium::WebDriver
  browser.manage.delete_all_cookies
else
  raise "Don't know how to clear cookies. Weird driver?"
end

When you just went through a long debug-fest and infested your code with dozens of debug messages, it can be hard to find all those calls to puts and p. This note describes a hack that lets you trace those messages in your code.

Let's say you want to get rid of a console message "foobar". Copy the Undebug class below to config/initializers.rb. In the same initializer, type a line:

Undebug.trace_message('foobar')

Now run tests or whatever you need to do to to trigger that message. The console output should look like this:

...

This is a problem when using Selenium with Firefox. We recommend using ChromeDriver for your Selenium tests.

Firefox will not trigger focus/blur events when its window is not focused. While this makes sense in standard usage, it breaks in parallel test execution.

Please do not rely on focus events in your tests. The linked card has an example of how to build passing tests that deal with focus/blur events.

Instead of running all missing migrations on your test database with rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test you can also use a handful of rake tasks to prepare the database structure directly. They can produce different results, though.

In a nutshell, to ensure your test database gains the correct structure:

• Don't use rake db:test:prepare carelessly
• or use rake db:test:clone_structure ← preferred :)
• or use rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test and don't mix it with other ways, like some of the rake tasks.

rake db:test:prepare
------------...

The User-Agent HTTP header identifies the client and is sent by "regular" browsers, search engine crawlers, or other web client software.

Cucumber

In Rack::Test, you can set your user agent like this on Capybara:

Given /^my user agent is "(.+)"$/ do |agent|
  page.driver.browser.header('User-Agent', agent)
  # Or, for older Capybaras:
  # page.driver.header('User-Agent', agent)
end

For Selenium tests with Firefox, it seems you can set the general.useragent.override profile setting to your preferred value. [See StackOver...

We often use VCR to stub external APIs. Unfortunately VCR can have problems matching requests to recorded cassettes, and these issues are often hard to debug.

VCR's error messages mostly look like this and are not very helpful:

An HTTP request has been made that VCR does not know how to handle:
         POST http://another-site.de:9605/json/index

VCR fails if the request does not exactly look like the request it has recorded. If the request is d...

As attachments to this card you will find a Cucumber feature and supplementing step definition that you can use to provoke Selenium focus issues that only occur when two focus-sensitive Selenium scenarios run at the same time (probably with parallel_tests). This can help you to detect and fix flickering integration tests.

The attached feature works by going to your root_path and focusing a random form element every 5...

When a controller action redirects to an external URL (like http://somehost.com/some/path) you will find that this is hard to test with Cucumber and Capybara:

• A non-Javascript Rack::Test scenario will just ignore the host and try to open /some/path in your local application
• A Selenium test will actually follow the redirect, which you probably don't want either

There are two workarounds for this. You can use either, or a combination of both.

1. Write a controller spec

Controller specs can test if a resp...

Whenever Firefox updates, all your Cucumber features that use Selenium break. This is annoying.

In order to remedy this, version 0.5.0 of our geordi gem comes with a script that helps you create an unchanging version of Firefox for your Selenium tests. In particular, this new copy of Firefox will have the following properties:

• It won't update itself with a newer version
• It can co-exist with your regular Firefox installation (which you can update at will)
• It will use a profile separate from the one...

Unfortunately, Capybara does not offer a switch to disable cookies in your test browser. However, you can work around that by using a tiny Rack middleware -- it works for both Selenium and non-Selenium tests.

Wouldn't it be nice to say something like this?

Given cookies are disabled
When I try to sign in
Then I should see "Can't sign you in. Please enable cookies."

You can! Put the code below into some place like lib/rack/cookie_stripper.rb.

module Rack
  class CookieStripper
    
    ENABLED = false

...