If you're using the Capybara webdriver, steps sometimes fail because the browser hasn't finished loading the next page yet, or it still has a pending AJAX request. You'll often see workarounds like

When I wait for the page to load
Then ...

Workarounds like this do not work reliably, will result in flickering tests and should be avoided. There is no known reliable way to detect if the browser has finished loading the page.

Solution

Instead you should wait until you can observe the result of a page load. E.g. if yo…

Here's a pretty useful steps that hasn't made it into Spreewald yet.

It is best used with the auto-mapper for BEM classes in features/support/selectors.rb

When I hover above [selector] element

When /^I hover above (.*) element$/ do |selector|
  page.find(selector_for(selector)).hover
end

Example:

When I hover above the album's image element

→ triggers a hover event on .album--image

If the application under test makes sound, you probably want to disable this during integration testing.

You can use the args option to pass parameters to the browser. For Chrome:

Capybara.register_driver :selenium do |app|
  Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app, browser: :chrome, args: ["--mute-audio"])
end

I haven't found a corresponding command line option for Firefox.

Hat tip to kratob.

If your external displays not switching on or showing a weird behavior (for e.g. all displays getting the same configuration all the time) you can fix it by switching off all external displays and re-enabling only one in the first step. Afterwards you can apply your whole configuration via xrandr. This behavior could be a bug in the kernel and may be fixed in linux 4.8.

Example display configuration

```
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 5760 x 1200, maximum 32767 x 32767
eDP1 connected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis…

Same requests are recorded only once in vcr. Replaying a test fails, if you trigger the same request multiple times. The error message is somehow confusing, as your cassette contains the request:

An HTTP request has been made that VCR does not know how to handle

If you want to allow to match a request multiple times, you need to configure this explicit with allow_playback_repeats: true. Some example configurations:

```
# specific ca…

Similar to our snippet that runs all Cucumber features matching a given string, the following will run all modified or new Cucumber features by looking at your git status:

git status --short | grep -v '^ D ' | grep '.feature' | sed 's/.. //' | tr '\n' ' ' | xargs geordi cucumber

If you want to know what each of the above commands does, see [explainshell](http://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=git+status+–short+%7C+grep+-v+%27%5E+D+%27+%7C+grep+%27.feature%27+%7C+sed+%27s%2F..+%2F%2F%27+%7C+tr+%27%5Cn%27+%27+%27+%7C…

Capistrano is by default configured to exclude the gems of the groups development and test when deploying to the stages production and staging. Whenever you create custom groups in your Gemfile, make sure to exclude these, if they should not be deployed to the servers. The gems of these groups might not be loaded by rails, however, the deployment process will take longer as the gems will be downloaded and installed to the server.

e.g. to exclude the groups cucumber and deploy, add the following to `config/deploy/production.rb…

Isolate scopes offer three kinds of variable binding. One of them is &, allowing to bind a property of the isolate scope to a function in the parent scope. Example:

# HTML
<panel proxy="parent.someFunction(arg1, arg2)"></div>

# Coffeescript
@app.directive 'panel', ->
  scope:
    parentFn: '&proxy'
  link: (scope) ->
    scope.parentFn(arg1: 'first', arg2: 'second')

In this dumb example, the panel directive will call its scope's parentFn() function with two arguments, which proxies to parent.someFunction('first', 'second')…

Processes in Linux might be put into Swap ("virtual memory") occasionally.
Even parts of a single process might be removed from memory and put into Swap.

In order to find out which processes remain within Swap, run this:

sudo grep VmSwap /proc/*/status | egrep -v "0 kB"

Keep in mind Swap is not evil by definition. Some bytes per process beeing put to Swap will not have that much of performance influence.

If you want the Linux virtual memory manager (which is responsible for the decision if and which processes are moved to Swap) to be…

The following will search for all .feature files containing a search term and run them using geordi.

find features/ -name '*.feature' | xargs grep -li 'YOUR SEARCH TERM' | sort -u | tr '\n' ' ' | xargs geordi cucumber

If you do not use Geordi, xargs cucumber or similar might work for you.

For details about each command, see [explainshell.com](http://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=find+features%2F+-name+%27*.feature%27+%7C+xargs+grep+-li+%27YOUR+SEARCH+TERM%27+%7C+sort+-u+%7C+tr+%27%5Cn%27+%2…

At least Selenium cannot find disabled fields. Unless you find them explicitly:

find_field 'This is disabled', disabled: true

Spreewald gives you the <step> within <selector> meta step that will constrain page inspection to a given scope.

Unfortunately, this does not work with RSS feeds, as they're XML documents and not valid when viewed from Capybara's internal browser (e.g. a <link> tag cannot have content in HTML).

Inspecting XML

If you're inspecting XML that is invalid in HTML, you need to inspect the page source instead of the DOM. You may use Spreewald's "… in the HTML" meta step, or add this proxy step fo…

Capybara uses www.example.com as the default hostname when making requests.
If your application does something specific on certain hostnames and you want to test this in a feature, you need to tell Capybara to assume a different host.

Given /^our host is "([^\"]+)"$/ do |host|
  page.config.stub app_host: "http://#{host}"
  
  # In older Capybaras (< 2.15) you needed to do this instead:
  Capybara.stub app_host: "http://#{host}"
end

You can now say:

When I go to the start page
Then I should not see "Home ...