Rails supports writing Capybara tests out of the box since the 5.1 release in the form of system tests. This means you don’t need to configure database cleaning strategies or have a separate webdriver configuration file with hard-to-understand configuration settings, or other verbose capybara/selenium configurations in the rails_helper file. A few driven_by declarations in rails_helper are pretty much all we need and it just works.
Configuration
Our Gemfile should include the following gems:
#Gemfile
group :test do
gem "capybara"
gem "selenium-webdriver"
gem "rspec-rails"
end
The rails_helper configuration is also much simpler.
#spec/rails_helper.rb
RSpec.configure do |config|
config.before(:each, type: :system) do
driven_by :rack_test # rack_test by default, for performance
end
config.before(:each, type: :system, js: true) do
driven_by :selenium_chrome_headless # selenium when we need javascript
end
end
You might notice we’re using rack_test as our default driver for performance; you can refer to this article for more details.
Git history Gotcha
When migrating to system specs you’ll need to move your specs files from spec/features/ to spec/system/. This will mess up the git history of those files as it will look like they were first created as part of that change. Old commits for the feature files will not be
automatically tied to that file.
However, if you have log.follow set to true in your gitconfig, then
Git will track the history back through the old filename and the
complete history will be visible.
Additional resources
Ruby on Rails 5.1 Release Notes
Rspec system specs documentation
Upgrading to RSpec 3.7.2 and system specs
Have fun writing system specs 🎉
