Suggested Workflow

Set the ruby version in .ruby-version to 2.3.5, then perform these steps one by one, fixing errors as they occur:

1) Update gems as listed below, and bundle
2) Boot a Rails console - see below for a list of changes you will probably need
3) Run Specs with --backtrace option
4) Run Cucumber features (with Geordi's --debug option)
5) When all tests are green, look through your Gemfile and remove as many version constraints as possible.
6) Boot the application in different environements to spot further issues, e…

Cucumber factory supports polymorphic associations out of the box. Just keep in mind that you need to use named associations for this purpose.

class Person < ApplicationModel
  has_many :buildings, inverse_of: :owner
end

class Company < ApplicationModel
  has_many :buildings, inverse_of: :owner
end

class Building < ApplicationModel
  belongs_to :owner, optional: true, polymorphic: true
end

Works

```
Given there is a person with the name "Nice person"
And there is a buildin…

Cucumber has an output format that prints step definitions only. You can use this to find unused ones:

1. Temporarily add require_relative 'env' to the top of the first file in features/support. --dry-run makes Cucumber skip loading env.rb.
2. Open a really wide terminal window.
3. bundle exec cucumber --dry-run --format stepdefs | grep -B1 'NOT MATCHED' --no-group-separator | grep features/step_definitions

This will print all unused step definitions from your project – however, the result will include false positives. Step…

When upgrading Rails versions – especially major versions – you will run into a lot of unique issues, depending on the exact version, and depending on your app.

However, it is still possible to give some generic advice on how you want to tackle the update in principle.

How many update steps?

Besides the Rails upgrade itself, you might also want to

• upgrade your other gems
• upgrade your Ruby versions

First decide in how many steps you want to run the upgrade. I suggest

• To do a separate step for each major rails versions. So, if…

Accessing pseudo elements via JavaScript or jQuery is often painful/impossible. However, accessing their styles is fairly simple.

Using getComputedStyle

First, find the element in question.

let element = document.querySelector('.my-element') // or $('.my-element').get(0) when using jQuery

Next, use JavaScript's getComputedStyle. It takes an optional 2nd argument to filter for pseudo elements.

```javascript
let style = window.getComputedStyle(element, '::before')
let color = style.getPropertyValue('background-color…

TLDR: In tests you need to clean out the database before each example. Use :transaction where possible. Use :deletion for Selenium features or when you have a lot of MyISAM tables.

Understanding database cleaning

You want to clean out your test database after each test, so the next test can start from a blank database. To do so you have three options:

• Wrap each test in a transaction which is rolled back when you're done (through DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction or `config.use_transactional_fi…

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…

When you def methods in RSpec tests, you can use super to call a method definition that was created in a surrounding describe/context block.

Example:

describe User do

  def build_user(attributes = {})
    User.new(attributes)
  end

  describe '#my_method' do
    it 'does something' do
      # ...
    end

    context 'when the user has an e-mail address' do
      def build_user(attributes = {})
        super({ email: 'user@example.com' }.merge(attributes))
      end

      it 'd...

TL;DR Debugging problems with javascript errors in cucumber tests is sometimes easier in the browser. Run the test, stop at the problematic point (with Then pause from Spreewald 1.7+) and open VNC for Firefox.

Features:

• It does not freeze your server like when you're using a debugger. (Compared to the Then debugger step)
• It enables interacting with the server. (Compared to taking screenshots in Capybara)
• It is a faster altern…

Raising JavaScript errors in Cucumber

With selenium JavaScript errors do not cause any failture in your cucumber scenarios. To archive a failture we can use the the Ruby bindings to Selenium Webdriver expose the Webdriver logging API introduced in version 2.38 .

The following step can be used:

```
Then /^there should be no JavaScript errors$/ do
if alert_present?
# Chrome 54 and/or Chromedriver 2.24 introduced a breaking change on how
# accessing browser logs work.
#
# Apparently, while an alert/confirm is open, Chro…

There is no CSS selector for matching elements that contains a given string ¹. Luckily, Capybara offers the :text option to go along with your selector:

page.find('div', text: 'Expected content')

You can also pass a regular expression!

page.find('div', text: /Expected contents?/i)

Note that if your CSS selector is as generic as div, you might get a lot more results than you expect. E.g. a <div class="container"> that surrounds your entire layout will probably also contain that text (in a descendant) and Capybara wil…

Cucumber will save a file tmp/parallel_cucumber_failures.log will the filenames and line number of the failed scenarios after a full test run.

Normally you can say cucumber -p rerun (rerun is a profile defined by default in config/cucumber.yml) to rerun all failed scenarios. Unfortunately this does not work with geordi yet.

Here is a list of possible workarounds:

```
geordi firefox bundle exec cucumber -p rerun
cat tmp/parallel_cucucmber_failures.log | xargs geordi cucumber
geordi cucumber `cat…

At makandra, we've built a few gems over the years. Some of these are quite popular: spreewald (475k downloads), active_type (330k downloads), and geordi (210k downloads) for example (numbers from 2018).

Developing a Ruby gem is different from developing Rails applications, with the biggest difference: there is no Rails. This means:

• no defined structure (neither for code nor directories)
• no autoloading of classes, i.e. you need to require all files yourself
• no [active_support](https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport.ht…

Cucumber allows for prose in features and scenarios. Example:

Feature: Cancel account

  There are several ways to cancel a user account. Admins need to 
  do it in complex cases, but normally, users can do it themselves.
  
  Scenario: User cancels his own account
    
    Users should be able to cancel an account themselves, so the 
    admins do not need to do it.
    
    Given a user account for "willy@astor.de"
    When I sign in as "willy@astor.de"
    And I follow "Cancel account"
    Then I should see "Account canceled"

B…