No method error when using capybara and rspec

Question

I'm really liking capybara and rpsec and I can write some great integration tests with them. However, I am slightly confused by something. I may be wrong here, but it seems, once I've installed capybara, and I have my specs in spec/features, capybara methods such as visit are available to the specs inside spec/features (e.g. spec/features/controllers/statuses_spec.rb), but rspec methods such as route_to are now unavailable to these specs!

What does this mean? Does capybara provide methods that make up for my now unavailable rspec methods? E.g, visit, rather than get?

This doesn't seem very intuitive. Hopefully I'm doing something wrong regarding my setup:

Gemfile:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

group :development do
    gem 'capistrano'
    gem 'guard-rspec'
    gem 'rb-fsevent'
    gem 'debugger'
end

group :development, :test do
    gem 'rspec-rails', '~> 2.14.0'
    gem 'sqlite3'
end

group :test do
    gem 'factory_girl_rails'
    gem 'capybara', '~> 2.2.0'
#   gem "capybara-webkit"
    gem 'launchy'
    gem 'database_cleaner'
end

group :production do
    gem 'pg'
end

gem 'rails', '4.0.1'
gem 'sass-rails', '~> 4.0.0'
gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.3.0'
gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 4.0.0'
gem 'jquery-rails'
gem 'turbolinks'
gem 'jbuilder', '~> 1.2'

group :doc do
  gem 'sdoc', require: false
end

gem 'devise'
# Use puma as the app server
# gem 'puma'

spec/spec_helper.rb

# This file is copied to spec/ when you run 'rails generate rspec:install'
ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'test'
require File.expand_path("../../config/environment", __FILE__)
require 'rspec/rails'
require 'rspec/autorun'
require 'capybara/rspec'

# Requires supporting ruby files with custom matchers and macros, etc,
# in spec/support/ and its subdirectories.
Dir[Rails.root.join("spec/support/**/*.rb")].each { |f| require f }

# Checks for pending migrations before tests are run.
# If you are not using ActiveRecord, you can remove this line.
ActiveRecord::Migration.check_pending! if defined?(ActiveRecord::Migration)

RSpec.configure do |config|
  # ## Mock Framework
  #
  # If you prefer to use mocha, flexmock or RR, uncomment the appropriate line:
  #
  # config.mock_with :mocha
  # config.mock_with :flexmock
  # config.mock_with :rr
  config.before(:suite) do
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
    DatabaseCleaner.clean_with(:truncation)
  end

  config.before(:each) do
    Capybara.run_server = true
    Capybara.javascript_driver = :webkit
    Capybara.default_selector = :css
    Capybara.server_port = 7171
    DatabaseCleaner.start
  end

  config.after(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.clean
  end

  # Remove this line if you're not using ActiveRecord or ActiveRecord fixtures
  config.fixture_path = "#{::Rails.root}/spec/fixtures"

  config.include RSpec::Rails::RequestExampleGroup, type: :feature

  # If you're not using ActiveRecord, or you'd prefer not to run each of your
  # examples within a transaction, remove the following line or assign false
  # instead of true.
  config.use_transactional_fixtures = true

  # If true, the base class of anonymous controllers will be inferred
  # automatically. This will be the default behavior in future versions of
  # rspec-rails.
  config.infer_base_class_for_anonymous_controllers = false

  # Run specs in random order to surface order dependencies. If you find an
  # order dependency and want to debug it, you can fix the order by providing
  # the seed, which is printed after each run.
  #     --seed 1234
  config.order = "random"
end

spec/features/controllers/statuses_spec.rb

require 'spec_helper'

describe StatusesController do
    describe "routing" do
    # contains only capybara methods and so it passes
    it "contains welcome message" do
      visit("/statuses")
      page.should have_content("All of our statuses ")
    end

    # contains rspec methods and so I recieve a no method failure
    it "responds with 200" do
      get("/statuses").should respond_with 200
    end

  end
end

Output:

13:17:44 - INFO - Running: spec/features/controllers/statuses_spec.rb
.F

Failures:

  1) StatusesController routing responds with 200
     Failure/Error: get("/statuses").should respond_with 200
     NoMethodError:
       undefined method `respond_with' for #<RSpec::Core::ExampleGroup::Nested_1::Nested_1:0x00000101787560>
     # ./spec/features/controllers/statuses_spec.rb:12:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'

Finished in 0.40626 seconds
2 examples, 1 failure

I bet it's something to do with placing these specs in a 'features' directory, but I need to place them in a 'features' directory to utilize capybara methods.

So I need to place all specs that use capybara methods in 'features' and all that use rspec methods in 'spec'? Hope not. How should I setup my files?

you're mixing methods for controller tests and methods for feature specs — apneadiving
I did only start using rspec and capybara a few hours ago..could you explain please? — Starkers
to be short: in specs/features folder, you should only use visit with paths, fill forms and click etc... in specs/controller use get or any http verb to be sure your controller behaves as you desire — apneadiving

Dty Dty · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-25T14:16:55

A full explanation here

Use RSpec request specs to test interactions with your application as a HTTP API. To do so, use methods like get, post, put, delete and assert against response.

Use RSpec feature specs (with capybara) to test your application as a user might interact with it. To do so, use methods like visit and assert against page.

No method error when using capybara and rspec

1 Answers