To improve your chances to get proper error messages, you can try
^

• to start cucumber with the -b option, so it shows a full backtrace
• to start cucumber with the -f pretty option to get a more verbose formatter
• to start cucumber with the -d option to show debug information

This note describes a Cucumber step definition that lets you say:

Then "Mow lawn" should be an option for "Activity"
But "Reply support mail" should not be an option for "Activity"

Note that this step checks whether an option is available, not that it is selected. There is a separate step to test that an option is selected.

Capybara (0.4.1 or higher)

Then /^"([^"]*)" should( not)? be an option for "([^"]*)"(?: within "([^\...

Webrat

Then /^I should get a response with status (\d+)$/ do |status|
  response.status.should include(status)
end

Capybara

Then /^I should get a response with status (\d+)$/ do |status|
  page.status_code.should include(status.to_i)
end

This card describes a Cucumber step that lets you say:

When I perform basic authentication as "username/password" and I visit the admin area

The path component ("... the admin area") is parsed through your path_to helper in features/support/paths.rb.

Capybara

The step definition is part of Spreewald. The step has been tested with multiple versions of Capybara, Rack::Test and Selenium.

Webrat (legacy)

This is a simpler version of the step above:

When /...

Are you adding a "Then show me the page" and re-run Cucumber whenever there is a failing scenario? Don't be that guy!

Save time with the shiny new version of our cucumber_spinner gem. It comes with a Cucumber formatter that not only displays an awesome progress bar, and shows failing scenarios immediately, it will also open the current page in your browser whenever a scenario step fails.

After you installed the gem, use the formatter like this:

cucumber --format CucumberSpinner::Curiou...

Update: This trick probably isn't very useful anymore in Ruby 2.x. The Ruby GC has improved a lot over the years.

Joe Van Dyk discovered that running the Ruby garbage collector only every X seconds can speed up your tests. I found that deferring garbage collection would speed up my RSpec examples by about 15%, but it probably depends on the nature of your tests. I also tried applying it to Cucumber f...

If you want to iterate over a Range, but only look at every n-th element, use the step method:

(0..10).step(5).each do |i|
  puts i
end

# Prints three lines:
# 0
# 5
# 10

This is useful e.g. to iterate over every Monday in a range of Dates.

If you are using Rails or ActiveSupport, calling step without a block will return an array of matching elements:

(0..10).step(5) 
# => [0, 5, 10]

The step definitions below allow you to write this in both Webrat and Capybara:

When I follow "Download as PDF"
Then I should get a response with content-type "application/pdf"

Capybara

Then /^I should get a response with content-type "([^"]*)"$/ do |content_type|
  page.response_headers['Content-Type'].should == content_type
end

Webrat

Then /^I should get a response with content-type "([^"]*)"$/ do |content_type|
  response.content_type.should == content_type
end

Unfortunatly this do...

Our collection of the most useful Cucumber steps, Spreewald, now supports exact matching of form fields and lets you use wildcards.

Examples:

And the "Money" field should contain "134"
# -> Only is green if that field contains the exact string "134", neither "134,50" nor "1000134"

And the "Name" field should contain "*Peter*"
# -> Accepts if the field contains "Peter" or "Anton Peter" or "Peter Schödl" etc.

And the "Comment" field should contain "Dear*bye"
# -> Accepts if the field contains "De...

When you need to see the content of a page (i.e. not all the HTML but the relevant text body)

• you can do pp (html_content)
  • pp will format the html String human readable pretty printed
• where html_content can be replaced by one of the following commands:

Rails

body or response.body

Capybara:

• page.driver.html.content
• page.body

Webrat:

Nokogiri::HTML(response.body).content

The returned strings can be cleaned up by calling .gsub(/^\s*$/, '').squeeze("\n") on them.\
Although this may be useful for d...

Using this step definition you can check if any form field (text field, checkbox, etc) or button is disabled:

Then the "Name" field should be disabled
  And the "Save" button should be disabled
But the "Locked" field should not be disabled

Capybara

This step part of Spreewald.

Webrat

Then /^"([^\"]*)" should( not)? be disabled$/ do |label, negate|
  attributes = field_labeled(label).element.attributes.keys
  attributes.send(negate ? :should_not : :should...

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...

The first thing you need to understand is that the purpose of refinements in Ruby 2.0 is to make monkey-patching safer. Specifically, the goal is to make it possible to extend core classes, but to limit the effect of those extensions to a particular area of code. Since the purpose of this feature is make monkey-patching safer, let’s take a look at a dangerous case of monkey-patching and see how this new feature would improve the situation.

This card explains how to install RubyMine for the first time. If you want to upgrade an existing RubyMine installation (after legacy install) to a newer version, see How to upgrade RubyMine.

Option A (new way)

Ubuntu 16.04 comes with snap, a way to package software with all its dependencies. RubyMine is also packaged as a snap.

A snap will always track a channel (like stable, beta) and automatically update to the newest version available in this channel. By default the snap daemon will check for ...

Have you guys ever done the math on that? You asked or allowed for 24000 interruptions from literally every human being in the world who could fall onto a keyboard and make an e-mail go to you. (Merlin Mann)

So you decided to put a price on your attention and not check your e-mail 24000 times a year. A first step is to disable automatic e-mail checks in Thunderbird.

1. Open Edit -> Account settings and select your incoming mail account.
   ...

E.g. when you're using a tagging gem, you have seen virtual attributes that get and set a string array:

post = Post.last
puts post.tag_list # ['foo', 'bar', 'baz']
post.tag_list = ['bam']
puts post.tag_list # ['bam']

If you would like to create a form displaying one check box per tag, you can do this:

- form_for @post do |form|
  = form.check_box :tag_list, { :multiple => true }, 'foo', nil
  = form.check_box :tag_list, { :multiple => true }, 'bar', nil
  =...

In order to go back one page in your Cucumber tests, you can use the following step definition for Capybara:

When(/^I go back$/) do
  visit page.driver.request.env['HTTP_REFERER']
end

If you're on Webrat, this should work:

When(/^I go back$/) do
  visit request.env["HTTP_REFERER"])
end

An improved version of this step is now part of our gem spreewald on Github.

Selenium has been the siren song that continually calls out to us. Unfortunately, in practice we’ve been unable to get Selenium to run reliably for real applications, on both developers machines and on the continuous integration server. This failure with Selenium has caused us to search for alternative solutions

This step tests whether a given select option comes preselected in the HTML. There is another step to test that an option is available at all.

Capybara

Then /^"([^"]*)" should be selected for "([^"]*)"(?: within "([^\"]*)")?$/ do |value, field, selector|
  with_scope(selector) do
    field_labeled(field).find(:xpath, ".//option[@selected = 'selected'][text() = '#{value}']").should be_present
  end
end

Webrat
...

To only run the next two migrations:

rake db:migrate STEP=2

To revert the previous two migrations:

rake db:rollback STEP=2

To revert the last two migrations and then migrate to the most current version:

rake db:migrate:redo STEP=2

To migrate to a given migration number, regardless of whether that means migrating up or down:

rake db:migrate VERSION=20100627185630

To migrate exactly one individual migration out of the sequence* (careful):

rake db:migrate:up VERSION=20100627185630

To revert exactly one individual m...

As a user of Bundler you have spent significant time looking at this message:

Fetching source index for http://rubygems.org/

To make Bundler skip this index update and only use installed gems, you can use the --local option:

bundle install --local

Unfortunately this does not work with bundle update.

It is said that Bundler 1.1 will use a feature of Rubygems.org that allows partial index updates. Hopefully the wh...

This note describes a Cucumber step definition that lets you test whether or not a CSS selector is present on the site:

Then I should see an element "#sign_in"
But I should not see an element "#sign_out"

Here is the step definition for Capybara:

Then /^I should (not )?see an element "([^"]*)"$/ do |negate, selector|
  expectation = negate ? :should_not : :should
  page.send(expectation, have_css(selector))
end

Here is the step definition for Webrat:

Then /^I should (not )?see an element "([^"]*)"$/ do |negate...

Terminus is a Capybara driver where most of the driver functions are implemented in client-side JavaScript. It lets you script any browser on any machine using the Capybara API, without any browser plugins or extensions.