RSpec and Webrat for Rails Integration Testing

Getting RSpec and Webrat to cooperate has gotten a bit easier recently, so make sure you have all the latest versions of the webrat, rspec and rspec-rails gems installed. Some quirks remain which might trip you up coming from TestUnit. For example if you

cd spec/integration

and

spec ./user_integration_spec.rb

or

ruby ./user_integration_spec.rb

you might get

undefined method `visit (…)

while a similar procedure would run fine in test/integration with TestUnit

But with RSpec, when you run

spec ./spec/integration/user_integration_spec.rb

or

rake spec:integration

all is well. It seems you have to stand at least in the spec directory or above, otherwise the block

Webrat.configure do |config|
config.mode = :rails  
config.open_error_files = false 
end

in spec_helper.rb will not run correctly.

So remember that RSpec is a bit less forgiving than TestUnit in how your tests are called.

It’s also important that you run

script/generate rspec

after installing RSpec to have the rake tasks “installed”.

Finally, his procedure will likely not be necessary with recent versions of Webrat and RSpec.

See here for a testing system for Rails that integrates RSpec and Webrat, it makes a lot of sense.

Posted: 08 June 2010