I want to learn how to write unit tests for a Rails App. Where do I start? All the tutorials on Google are old, back from 2007, and there seem to be an abundance of choice but not a preferred solution.
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I want to learn how to write unit tests for a Rails App. Where do I start? All the tutorials on Google are old, back from 2007, and there seem to be an abundance of choice but not a preferred solution.
Right now most people seem to be using Rspec for unit testing and Cucumber for integration testing. You can see a fairly recent poll here where 87% chose Rspec in a survey.
A great book for Rspec and Cucumber is The Rspec Book written by the current maintainer of Rspec. It goes over both Rspec and Cucumber.
Railscasts also has a few relevant screencasts. Cucmber1, Cucumber2
Many people seem to love Cucumber but it doesn’t seem as useful if you don’t have a client you’re doing work for. Most of my projects are side projects I do myself so these days I’m looking into Steak instead of Cucumber. This will allow me to use Rspec for unit tests and Steak for integration tests and reduces some complexity/tedium that is introduced when using Cucumber.
People have said that it doesn’t really matter which testing framework you pick, it’s more important that you START TESTING. I agree with that but hopefully these resources will help you get started.
However, one thing you probably want to avoid from the very start are fixtures. Use factories instead and check out this Railscasts episode on it.
UPDATE: Steak is no longer necessary and the same functionality is baked into Rspec.