The other day I wanted to add support for tests of javascript functionality in a (dockerized) rails application using rspec-rails.
Since rails 5.1 includes system tests with niceties like automatically taking a screenshot on failed tests, I hoped for a way to benefit from this
features without changing to another test framework. Lucky me only recently the authors of rspec-rails added support for so-called system specs. There is not much documentation so far (but there are a lot of useful information in the corresponding bug report
#1838 and a friendly guy named Thomas Walpole (
@twalpole) is helpfully answering to questions in that issue.
To make things a little bit more complicated: the application in question is usually running in a docker container and thus the tests of the application are also run in a docker container. I didn t want to change this, so here is what it took me to get this running.
Overview
Let s see what we want to achieve exactly: From a technical point of view, we will have the application under test (AUT) and the tests in one container (let s call it: web) and we will need another container running a javascript-capable browser (let s call it browser).
Thus we need the tests to drive a remote running browser (at least when running in a docker environment) which needs to access the application under a different address than usually. Namely an address reachable by the
chrome-container, since it will not be reachable via
127.0.0.1 as is (rightfully) assumed by default.
If we want Warden authentication stubbing to work (as we do, since our application uses Devise) and transactional fixtures as well (e.g. rails handling database cleanup between tests without database_cleaner gem) we also need to ensure that the application server is being started by the tests and the tests are actually run against that server. Otherwise we might run into problems.
Getting the containers ready
Assuming you already have a container setup (and are using docker-compose like we do) there is not that much to change on the docker front. Basically you need to add a new service called
chrome and point it to an appropriate image and add a link to it in your existing
web-container.
I ve decided to use standalone-chrome for the browser part, for which there are docker images provided by the selenium project (they also have images for other browsers). Kudos for that.
...
services:
chrome:
image: selenium/standalone-chrome
web:
links:
- chrome
The link ensures that the chrome instance is available before we run the tests and that the the
web-container is able to resolve the name of this container. Unfortunately this is not true for the other way round, so we need some magic in our test code to find out the ip-address of the
web-container. More to this later.
Other than that, you probably want to configure a volume for you to be able to access the screenshots, which get saved to
tmp/screenshots
in the application directory.
Preparing the application for running system tests
There is a bit more to do on the application side. The steps are roughly:
- Add necessary depends / version constraints
- Register a driver for the remote chrome
- Configure capybara to use the appropriate host for your tests (and your configured driver)
- Add actual tests with
type: :system and js: true
Let s walk them through.
Add necessary depends
What we need is the following:
- rspec-rails version >= 3.7.1
- rails itself > 5.1.4 (unreleased at time of writing)
- capybara and capybara-selenium
The required features are already part of 3.7.0, but this version is the version I used and it contains a bugfix, which may or may not be relevant.
One comment about the rails version: for the tests to properly work it s viable to have puma use certain settings. In rails 5.1.4 (the version released, at time of writing this) uses the settings from
config/puma.rb which most likely collides with the necessary
settings. You can ensure these settings yourself or use rails from branch
5-1-stable which includes
this change. I decided for the latter and pinned my
Gemfile to the then current commit.
Register a driver for the remote chrome
To register the required driver, you ll have to add some lines to your
rails_helper.rb:
if ENV['DOCKER']
selenium_url =
"http://chrome:4444/wd/hub"
Capybara.register_driver :selenium_remote do app
Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app,
:url => selenium_url, :browser => :remote, desired_capabilities: :chrome )
end
end
Note that I added those lines conditionally (since I still want to be able to use a local chrome via chromedriver) if an environment variable
DOCKER is set.
We defined that environment variable in our
Dockerfile and thus you might need to adapt this to your case.
Also note that the selenium_url is hard-coded. You could very well take a different approach, e.g. using an externally specified SELENIUM_URL, but ultimately the requirement is that the driver needs to know that the chrome instance is running on host
chrome, port 4444 (the containers default).
Configure capybara to use the appropriate host and driver
The next step is to ensure that javascript-requiring system tests are actually run with the given driver and use the right host. To achieve that we need to add a before-hook to the corresponding tests or we can configure rspec accordingly to always include such a hook by modifying the rspec-configuration in
rails_helper.rb like this:
RSpec.configure do config
...
config.before(:each, type: :system, js: true) do
if ENV['DOCKER']
driven_by :selenium_remote
ip = Socket.ip_address_list.detect addr addr.ipv4_private? .ip_address
host! "http://# ip :# Capybara.server_port "
else
driven_by :headless_chrome
end
end
Note the part with the ip-address: it tries to find an IPv4 private address for the
web-container (the container running the tests) to ensure the
chrome-container uses this address to access the application. The
Capybara.server_port is important here, since it will
correspond to the puma instance launched by the tests.
That heuristic (first ipv4 private address) works for us at the moment, but it might not work for you. It is basically a workaround to the fact that I couldn t get
web resolvable for the chrome container which may be fixable on the docker side, but I was to lazy to further investigate that.
If you change it: Just make sure the
host! method uses an URI pointing to an address of the
web-container that is reachable to the
chrome-container.
Define tests with
type: :system and
js: true
Last but certainly not least, you need actual tests of the required type and with or without
js: true. This can be achieved by creating tests files starting like this:
RSpec.feature "Foobar", type: :system, js: true do
Since the new rspec-style system tests are based around the feature-specs which used to be around previously, the rest of the tests is exactly like it is
described for feature specs.
Run the tests
To run the tests a commandline like the following should do:
docker-compose run web rspec
It won t make a big noise about running the tests against chrome, unless something fails. In that case you ll see a message telling you where the screenshot has been placed.
Troubleshooting
Below I add some hints about problems I ve seen during configuring that:
Test failing, screenshot shows login screen
In that case puma might be configured wrongly or you are not using transactional fixtures. See the hints above about the rails version to use which also includes some pointers to helpful explanations.
Note that rspec-rails by default does not output the puma startup output as it clutters the tests. For debugging purposes it might be helpful to change that by adding the following line to your tests:
ActionDispatch::SystemTesting::Server.silence_puma = false
Error message: Unable to find chromedriver
This indicates that your driver is not configured properly, because the default for system tests is to be
driven_by selenium, which tries to spawn an own chrome instance and is suitable for non-dockerized tests.
Check if your tests are marked as js: true (if you followed the instructions above) and that you properly added the before-hook to your rspec-configuration.
Collisions with VCR
If you happen to have tests that make use of the
vcr gem you might see it complaining about not knowing what to do with the requests between the driver and the chrome instance. You can fix this, by telling VCR to ignore that requests, by adding a line where you configured VCR:
VCR.configure do config
# required so we don't collide with capybara tests
config.ignore_hosts 'chrome'
...
BBC Radio 4's long-running "Thought for the Day" has been in the news this
week, as several presenters for the Today Programme have criticised the segment
in an interview with Radio Times magazine.
One facet of the criticism was whether the BBC should be broadcasting three
minutes of religious content daily when more than half of the population are
atheist.
I'm an atheist and in my day-to-day life I have almost zero interaction with
people of faith, certainly none where faith is a topic of conversation. However
when I was an undergrad at Durham, I was a member of St John's
College which has a
Christian/Anglican/Evangelical heritage, and I met a lot of religious friends
during my time there.
What I find a little disturbing about the lack of faithful people in my
day-to-day life, compared to then, is how it shines a light on how disjoint our
society is. This has become even more apparent with the advent of the "filter
bubble" and how irreconcilable factions are around topics like Brexit, Trump,
etc.
For these reasons I appreciate Thought for the Day and hearing voices from
communities that I normally have little to do with. I can agree with the
complaints about the lack of diversity, and I particularly enjoy hearing Thoughts
from Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, and such.
Another criticism levelled against the segment was that it can be "preachy". I
haven't found that myself. I get the impression that most of the monologues are
carefully constructed to be as unpreaching as possible. I can usually appreciate
the ethical content of the talks, without having to buy into the faith aspect.
Interestingly the current principal of St John's College, David Wilkinson, has
written his own response to the interview for the Radio
Times.
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world in October 2017 (
Update 2017-10-31: The developers of Subversion were a bit surprised, but it turned out to be a genuine bug. The bug 
To understand why this is a problem, I restart from the already linked blog: Our packages have revision numbers based on the latest change revision of all the contained files. Since subversion has a linear history and central repository, this guarantees that in contrast to version numbers provided by authors the revision numbers are strictly increasing .
Well, it turned out that this assumption was wrong. Because it is easy to trick subversion to have wrong revision numbers for files. Consider the following flow:
Narabu is a new intraframe video codec. You probably want to read
Like 
The code for pulling the data from the UDD, as well as converting and importing it into Neo4j is available on 
This post has it all. Flotillas of sailboats, peer-to-peer wikis, games,
and de-frogging. But, I need to start by talking about some tech you may not
have heard of yet...
