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 (eg 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? Eg, 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?

Answer 1

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 .