Minimalist acceptance testing on top of RSpec
Steak is an Acceptance BDD solution (like Cucumber) but in plain Ruby. This is how an acceptance spec looks like in Steak:
feature "Main page" do background do create_user :login => "jdoe" login_as "jdoe" end scenario "should show existing quotes" do create_quote :text => "The language of friendship is not words, but meanings", :author => "Henry David Thoreau" visit "/" page.should have_css(".quote", :count => 1) within(:css, ".quote") do page.should have_css(".text", :text => "The language of friendship is not words, but meanings") page.should have_css(".author", :text => "Henry David Thoreau") end end end
No explicit givens, whens or thens. No steps, no english, just Ruby: RSpec, Steak and, in this example, some factories and Capybara. That’s all.
If you are not in Rails but use RSpec, then Steak is just some aliases providing you with the language of acceptance testing (feature, scenario, background). If you are in Rails, you also have a couple of generators, a rake task and full Rails integration testing (meaning Webrat support, for instance)
Just install and require the damned gem!
$ gem install steak
Then in your spec or spec helper:
require 'steak'
That’s all. You don’t really need to require RSpec.
Add this to your project’s Gemfile:
group :development, :test do gem 'rspec-rails' gem 'steak' gem 'capybara' # Other usual suspects: # gem 'delorean' # gem 'database_cleaner' # gem 'spork' end
And install:
$ bundle install
Run the generators:
$ rails g rspec:install $ rails g steak:install
That will create some basic helper files and directory structure under the spec/acceptance directory, already configured for Capybara.
Spend one minute on getting familiar with the structure and files you’ve got.
Now you may want to create your first acceptance spec:
$ rails generate steak:spec this_is_my_first_feature
You run your acceptance specs just like your regular specs. Individually…
$ rspec spec/acceptance/this_is_my_first_feature_spec.rb
…or all together:
$ rspec spec/acceptance
…you can also do:
$ rake spec:acceptance
Assuming you have already setup rspec-rails, add this to your project’s config/environments/test.rb:
config.gem "steak", :version => ">= 1.0.0.rc.1", :lib => false
Install the gem from the command line:
$ RAILS_ENV=test rake gems:install
Run the generator:
$ script/generate steak
That will create some basic helper files and directory structure under the spec/acceptance directory, already configured for Capybara. If you want to use Webrat, just pass it to the generator:
$ script/generate steak --webrat
Spend one minute on getting familiar with the structure and files you’ve got.
Now you may want to create your first acceptance spec:
$ script/generate acceptance_spec this_is_my_first_feature
You run your acceptance specs just like your regular specs. Individually…
$ spec spec/acceptance/this_is_my_first_feature_spec.rb
…or all together:
$ spec spec/acceptance
…you can also do:
$ rake spec:acceptance
Steak scenarios are just regular RSpec examples with their metadata attribute :type set to :acceptance. That’s useful if you want to make sure you include helpers or set hooks only for your acceptance specs and not for the rest of the specs in your suite.
You’d do it this way:
RSpec.configure do |config| # include MyHelpers module in every acceptance spec config.include MyHelpers, :type => :acceptance config.before(:each, :type => :acceptance) do # Some code to run before any acceptance spec end end
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Source: github.com/cavalle/steak
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Issues: github.com/cavalle/steak/issues
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IRC channel: #steakrb on freenode
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Twitter: twitter.com/steakrb
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Tutorial: jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/steak-because-cucumber-is-for-vegetarians/
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Hashtag: #steakrb
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More resources: wiki.github.com/cavalle/steak/resources
Steak was created by Luismi Cavallé and improved thanks to the love from:
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Álvaro Bautista
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Felipe Talavera
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Paco Guzmán
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Jeff Kreeftmeijer
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Jaime Iniesta
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Emili Parreño
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Andreas Wolff
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Wincent Colaiuta
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Falk Pauser
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Francesc Esplugas
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Raúl Murciano
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Enable Interactive
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Vojto Rinik
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Fred Wu
Copyright © 2009, 2010 Luismi Cavallé, released under the MIT license