Question

I am using Capybara with Cucumber in my rails application. I want to run the Sphinx reindex and the Redis server to be running for some specific Test Scenarios. But the downside here is the scenarios are very very slow making it run for hours.

Here is my env.rb file

require 'rubygems'

ENV["RAILS_ENV"] = "cucumber"

require 'cucumber/rails'
require 'capybara/cucumber'
require 'capybara/rails'
require 'capybara/session'
require 'rake'

Capybara.default_selector = :css
ActionController::Base.allow_rescue = false
Cucumber::Rails::World.use_transactional_fixtures = true
Capybara.default_wait_time = 4
Capybara.ignore_hidden_elements=false
Capybara::Server.new(Capybara.app).boot

include Rake::DSL
Rake::Task["db:fixtures:load"].invoke

Before('@javascript') do
  Capybara.register_driver :selenium do |app|
    Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app,:browser=>:chrome )
  end
  Capybara.current_driver = :selenium
  Capybara.javascript_driver=:selenium
end

Before('@javascript', '@index') do
  `rake ts:in RAILS_ENV=cucumber` unless ThinkingSphinx.sphinx_running?
  `rake ts:start RAILS_ENV=cucumber`
end

After('@javascript','@index') do
  `rake ts:stop RAILS_ENV=cucumber`
end

Before('@javascript','@redis','@javascript') do
  `redis-server config/test_redis.conf`
  `rake redis_specifics:cache_build RAILS_ENV=cucumber --trace`
end

After('@javascript','@redis','@javascript') do
  pid = `ps aux | grep 'config/test_redis.conf'| grep -v 'grep' | awk '{print $2}'`
  `pkill #{pid}`
end

One more problem is when I run this on different machines, there is a dependency that Redis is installed and that the user is having permission to create and destroy folders. Is there a better way to handle this situation? May be to implement the similar transactional style fixtures that the Normal testing framework of Rails uses ?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I’d suggest using a library like fakeredis (https://github.com/guilleiguaran/fakeredis). This will get rid of the dependency on redis in your tests, and ensure that data is not kept around between tests.

I’d expect there to be something similar for sphinx, but don’t know of anything off the top of my head.