Rails3 and rspec-rails-2.0.0.beta20 and cucumber-rails-0.3.2
Last week, I started a Rails3 project and considering I am sucker for TDD. I added the current stable versions of rspec-rails and cucumber-rails to the Gemfile. Now, this is a simple project (and honestly speaking I could have just used Sinatra) for the same, but I wanted to get a Rails3 app up and running.
When I say simple, I mean no “ActiveRecord”. Some might say I am better off using Sinatra with so little codebase to load but like I said it was just to get some hands on experience with Rails3. Developers mostly use rspec-rails and cucumber-rails with activerecord and since I wasn’t going to use activerecord, I hit a few road blocks.
Rspec-rails
First, let’s have a look at changes one needs to do use rspec-rails with activerecord. I am assuming that you have installed rspec in your rails app using the new rails3 generators and you have a spec_helper.rb in your spec folder. Just comment out the following lines to make it work with activerecord:
config.fixture_path = "#{::Rails.root}/spec/fixtures"
config.use_transactional_fixtures = true
spec_helper.rb file does have directions to remove these files in the absence of activerecord.
Cucumber-rails
Similarly, cucumber-rails actually relies on the fact that activerecord is always used. When you run rake:cucumber, you will probably see the following errors:
** Invoke cucumber:all (first_time) ** Invoke cucumber:ok (first_time) rake aborted! Don't know how to build task 'db:test:prepare'
Reason, because cucumber depends upon the db:test:prepare task to run. But in the absence of activerecord this causes issues since there is no db. I added a patch for the same which checks for the presence of database.yml and takes action accordingly. Here’s the lighthouse ticket and patch. You can monkey patch it in your app by modifying the rake task in lib/tasks/cucumber.rake.
In the end it was a good experience and taught me a bit more about cucumber and rspec.