Capybara with subdomains - default_host - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have an app that uses subdomains to switch databases (multi-tenancy). I'm trying to use Capybara for integration testing, and it really relies a lot on subdomains.
My understanding was that setting Capybara.default_host= to something would make all my requests come from this host. This doesn't seem to be the case. In this post, the author recommends just visiting the explicit url with a host, but this becomes a bit annoying if I'm navigating all over the place. I'd like to just set the host, then be able to use my rails paths as expected. Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but here's what I've tried:
# spec_helper.rb
RSpec.configure do |config|
config.before(:each, :type => :request) do
Capybara.default_host = 'http://app.mydomain.com'
end
end
# in some_integration_spec.rb
before do
puts "Capybara.default_host: #{Capybara.default_host}"
puts "some_app_url: #{some_app_url}"
end
This yields the output:
Capybara.default_host: http://app.mydomain.com
some_app_url: http://www.example.com/some_path
What am I doing wrong? default_host appears to do nothing. As I say, I don't want to have to say visit(Capybara.default_host + some_app_path) as that's a bit annoying each time. Why else does this default_host option exist?

Answer 1

I'm not sure of the intended use of default_host, but app_host does what you need. I've found I first need to call the rails session method host! in order to set the host string that will be passed to controllers in the request object.
Then you need to set Capybara.app_host to tell Capybara to call your app via the web server instead of just making the calls in process. If you don't do that then Capybara wigs out when it encounters redirects and drops the host information in the second request.
I'm not sure why this doesn't take care of the Rails request end of things automatically, but I've found that unless I set the host in both places explicitly, then I get inconsistent results.
def set_host (host)
host! host
Capybara.app_host = "http://" + host
end
before(:each) do
set_host "lvh.me:3000"
end
Then you can just use relative paths to access pages.
Update:
Capybara 2.x and rspec-rails 2.12.0 introduced "Feature" specs for running Capybara acceptance tests. The new FeatureExampleGroup module in rspec-rails is different from RequestExampleGroup and no longer has access to the rack-test host! method. Now you want to use default_url_options instead:
def set_host (host)
# host! host
default_url_options[:host] = host
Capybara.app_host = "http://" + host
end

Answer 2

When you need to change the URL to include the subdomain, you can specify the app_host in your step definitions. Use a domain like lvh.me since it points to 127.0.0.1:
Capybara.app_host = "http://#{subdomain}.lvh.me"
Capybara assumes that when you're specifying an app_host that you're testing a remote server running on port 80, but in our case, we're testing a local app which is running on a random port specified by Capybara. To fix this, in your env.rb file, add this line:
Capybara.always_include_port = true
Now when you visit a page of your app...
visit '/page'
...the url will specify the subdomain as well as the port that the app is running on.
FYI: This worked for me using Capybara 2.0.2.

Answer 3

This guy has the right answer here:
http://zurb.com/forrst/posts/Testing_Subdomains_in_Capybara-g4M
You want to do
Capybara.current_session.driver.reset!
Capybara.default_host = 'http://app.mydomain.com'

Answer 4

as of:
capybara (2.4.1)
capybara-webkit (1.3.0)
Capybara.server_host = "example.com"
Capybara.server_port = 3050
Capybara.run_server = true
Capybara.javascript_driver = :webkit #requires capybara-webkit

Answer 5

This is not exactly the same situation as you but this might help some people:
For my current project, I'm using pow with many subdomains. The test suite also has to run on a different port.
The solution depends on which version of capybara you're running.
For the current latest release I put this in custom_env.rb:
Capybara.server_host = 'myapp.dev'
Capybara.server_port = 9887
Capybara.run_server = true
# I don't remember what this was for. Another team member wrote this part...
module ActionDispatch
module Integration #:nodoc:
class Session
def host
[Capybara.server_host, Capybara.server_port].join(':')
end
end
end
end
With capybara 1.1.2, I had had to make the above change but server_host becomes app_host AND modify lib/capybara/server.rb in the gem like this:
def url(path)
..
if path =~ /^http/
path
else
# Was this (Capybara.app_host || "http://#{host}:#{port}") + path.to_s
(Capybara.app_host || "http://#{host}") + ":#{port}" + path.to_s
end
end