I'm having trouble debugging cucumber steps due to unique conditions of the testing environment. I wish there was a step that could pause a selenium test and let me take over.
E.g.
Scenario: I want to take over here
Given: A bunch of steps have already run
When: I'm stuck on an error
Then: I want to take control of the mouse
At that point I could interact with the application exactly as if I had done all the previous steps myself after running rails server -e test
Does such a step exist, or is there a way to make it happen?
You can integrate ruby-debug into your Cucumber tests. Nathaniel Ritmeyer has directions here and here which worked for me. You essentially require ruby-debug, start the debugger in your environment file, and then put "breakpoint" where ever you want to see what's going on. You can both interact with the browser/application and see the values of your ruby variables in the test. (I'm not sure whether it'll let you see the variables in your rails application itself - I'm not testing against a rails app to check that).
I came up with the idea to dump the database. It doesn't let you continue work from the same page, but if you have the app running during the test, you can immediately act on the current state of things in another browser (not the one controlled by Selenium).
Here is the step:
When /I want to take control/i do
exec "mysqldump -u root --password=* test > #{Rails.root}/support/snapshot.sql"
end
Because it is called by exec, DatabaseCleaner has no chance to truncate tables, so actually it's irrelevant that the command is a database dump. You don't have to import the sql to use the app in its current state, but it's there if you need it.
My teammate has done this using selenium, firebug a hook (#selenium_with_firebug)
Everything he learned came from this blogpost:
http://www.allenwei.cn/tips-add-firebug-extension-to-capybara/
Add the step
And show me the page
Where you want to interact with it
Scenario: I want to take over here
Given: A bunch of steps have already run
When: I'm stuck on an error
Then show me the page
use http://www.natontesting.com/2009/11/09/debugging-cucumber-tests-with-ruby-debug/
Big thank you to #Reed G. Law for the idea of dumping the database. Then loading it into development allowed me to determine exactly why my cucumber feature was not impacting database state as I had expected. Here's my minor tweak to his suggestion:
When /Dump the database/i do
`MYSQL_PWD=password mysqldump -u root my_test > #{Rails.root}/snapshot.sql`
# To replicate state in development run:
# `MYSQL_PWD=password mysql -u root my_development < snapshot.sql`
end
You can also use the following in feature/support/debugging.rb to let you step through the feature one step at a time:
# `STEP=1 cucumber` to pause after each step
AfterStep do |scenario|
next unless ENV['STEP']
unless defined?(#counter)
puts "Stepping through #{scenario.title}"
#counter = 0
end
#counter += 1
print "At step ##{#counter} of #{scenario.steps.count}. Press Return to"\
' execute...'
STDIN.getc
end
Related
Say I have a user_spec.rb for my User model, and I want to run that test inside the rails console.
My first thought is to execute the usual shell command:
exec("./spec/user_spec.rb")
But is there a simpler way to run the spec? I'm trying to automate some of the tests (and reinvent the wheel a little, yes), so being able to trigger an rspec test inside of another Ruby class seems ideal.
Edit:
output = `./spec/user_spec.rb`
This will provide the rspec output and $?.success? will then provide a pass fail value. Is this the best solution here? Or is there a way to call an RSpec class itself?
As pointed out by Anthony in his comment, you can use RSpec::Core::Runner to basically invoke the command line behavior from code or an interactive console. However, if you use something like Rails, consider that your environment is likely going to be set to development (or even production, if this is where you'll execute the code). So make sure that whatever you do doesn't have any unwanted side-effects.
Another thing to consider is that RSpec globally stores its configuration including all example groups that were registerd with it before. That's why you'll need to reset RSpec between subsequent runs. This can be done via RSpec.reset.
So putting it all together, you'll get:
require 'rspec/core'
RSpec::Core::Runner.run(['spec/path/to_spec_1.rb', 'spec/path/to_spec_2.rb'])
RSpec.reset
The call to RSpec::Core::Runner.run will output to standard out and return the exit code as a result (0 meaning no errors, a non-zero exit code means a test failed).
..
Finished in 0.01791 seconds (files took 17.25 seconds to load)
2 example, 0 failures
=> 0
You can pass other IO objects to RSpec::Core::Runner.run to specify where it should output to. And you can also pass other command line parameters to the first array of RSpec::Core::Runner.run, e.g. '--format=json' to output the results in JSON format.
So if you, for example, want to capture the output in JSON format to then further do something with it, you could do the following:
require 'rspec/core'
error_stream = StringIO.new
output_stream = StringIO.new
RSpec::Core::Runner.run(
[
'spec/path/to_spec_1.rb',
'spec/path/to_spec_2.rb',
'--format=json'
],
error_stream,
output_stream
)
RSpec.reset
errors =
if error_stream.string
JSON.parse(error_stream.string)
end
results =
if output_stream.string
JSON.parse(output_stream.string)
end
Run bundle exec rspec to run all tests or bundle exec rspec ./spec/user_spec.rb to run the specific test
I am writing Rails tests using the standard Test::Unit/TestCase.
Is there any way to somehow filter what gets printed to the log, so that you only print the stack for specific test cases.
I have a functional test file with many test cases in it, and I'm really only interested in debugging one test case. Printing my own log statements still requires searching through a few thousand lines of generated log. Or something similar to the RSpec 'pending' functionality.
Run from a command line ruby test/unit/my_model.rb to run one test suite. You can also use a debugger, such as (wrapped by) RubyMine or pry, to stop on a specific test case and look at the log.
But if a sledge-hammer does not solve the problem, you can use tweezers: config.logger.level = Logger::WARN in your test.rb, from Set logging levels in Ruby on Rails
It is probably better if instead of strangling the output to log/test.log, you become familiar with a command such as grep. Grep allows you to run very advanced search queries through files or directories, as long as your running on some flavor of *nix. The simplest use would be
grep search_term file_name
The reason I say you shouldn't constrict the log output is because someday that could bit you in the **s. Hope this helps.
User goes to page A to create a new multiplayer game
The script in page A generates a unique ID for the game, and creates a worker for it. Something like: rails runner GameWorker.new(:game_id => game_id).start_game
The script in page A redirects the user to page B, where he can see the newly created game, and others can join.
The worker should be alive until the end of the game.
What would be the proper way to run the command that starts the worker? It must be non blocking and ideally redirect output to the log file, in case something goes wrong.
I'm using Rails 3, if it matters.
UPDATE
I'm gonna rephrase my question: How to run a linux command from within ruby and don't wait for the command to end? I mean the equivalent for &>>. In php for instance, &>> works fine and I don't need to use any special php functiont, but in ruby it seems to get overriden by and the script waits for the command to end and grab the output.
I HIGHLY recommend not running a process per game. If you want a non-blocking game that is not turn based, then you probably want to look at event-machine, or something like https://github.com/celluloid/celluloid-io
With either, you'll be creating threads that you'll process at future points in time.
But -- if you do want to just fire off a process in ruby, here you go.. from How to fire and forget a subprocess?
pid = Process.fork
if pid.nil? then
# In child
exec "whatever --take-very-long"
else
# In parent
Process.detach(pid)
end
Folks,
I am having some trouble working with the Afterhook. I have organized my tests in folders like this:
features/Accounts/accounts_api.feature
features/Accounts/step_definition/account_steps.rb
features/labs/create_lab.feature
features/labs/step_definition/labs_steps.rb
Now I have an After hook present in the step definition of the Accounts feature, I want that hook to run after every scenario of the "Accounts" feature, but I do not want it to run after every scenario of the "labs" feature. I tried this:
cucumber --tags #newlabs
the above should run all the scenarios present in the labs feature tagged as newlabs but what I am seeing is that once the scenario tagged as#newlabs runs the #after hook present in the step definition of Accounts starts to run. I am thinking why is this happening, am I using the hook in the wrong way or is my overall understanding of hooks wrong?
Thanks a lot for taking the time to respond, this helps a lot.
Hooks don't care what step definition script they're located in and will run for every scenario. Or, more specifically, your after hook will run after every scenario that runs, for every feature, regardless of the tags you pass in to Cucumber.
If you want a little more control over that, check out the Cucumber wiki page on hooks and look in the section called 'Tagged hooks'.
Possibly you define After hook in wrong place. Note that After hook (as well as other hooks) must be defined in the .rb, not in the .feature file. Common place for hooks is features/support/hooks.rb. You will define your hook this way:
# features/support/hooks.rb
After('#newlabs') do # will run after each scenario tagged with #newlabs
# your teardown ruby code
end
# features/Accounts/accounts_api.feature
#newlabs # tag all scenarious of this feature with #newlabs tag
Feature: your feature
Scenario: your scenario
Given: ...
When: ...
Then: ...
In cucumber output you won't see that After hook is executed (unless you output something to STDOUT from the hook definition) - hooks will run implicitly.
I have a scenario outline with multiple scenarios. I'd like my Before hook to run only once so I can bootstrap the ActiveRecord objects I need to run against all of the scenarios. The problem is if I use
Before do
# my code here
end
This will execute before each Scenario. Is there anyway to run it once for the entire Outline?
I think if you simply create the objects in a file in features/support they will be persisted:
ImportantThing.create(:name => "USEFUL THING")
This is because before every Scenario Cucumber will start a database transaction and then rollback to its prior status, which should contain the objects you've loaded.
I had the same problem, where I needed to create a subscriber manager once for all of my event logging tests. If I just used a before hook or a regular step (e.g. a Given), the manager would be created before each scenario.
My solution was ultimately to use a tagged before hook on my first scenario.
Before('#first_logging_scenario') do
# do something useful
end
To shutdown my manager, I used a tagged After hook with my last scenario
After('#last_logging_scenario') do
# do something useful
end