Question

I can manually test my API via rails s and point my HTTP client to http://127.0.0.1:3000/api.

Now, I want to automatically test my API via features. So I successfully set up a guard server which starts cucumber and rspec.

Does cucumber start my application and provide my API entry point under any port? So that I can use a HTTP client inside my step definitions and point it to http://127.0.0.1:8989/api for example?

I know that I can specify a :cucumber_port => 4321 in the Guardfile but my API is not available under this port.

Answer 1

No, Cucumber doesn’t start your application with server.

To test it you can do the following:

1. Use rack_test. It provides you with methods like #get, #post, etc. It’s preferred. For example:

get('api/test')
response.code.should == '200'

1. Start you server with Capybara. It’ll be much longer however. You can do this by adding the following code to env.rb:

require 'capybara/rails'
Capybara::Server.new(Capybara.app).boot

Now you can access your API at http://127.0.0.1:9887/api