Testing is one of the most important parts of software development and helps to ensure bugs don’t get into production and that code can be refactored safely. If you’re working on a team with multiple people with different skill sets, you might have people doing testing who only know windows and development is only using OSX or Linux. We want everyone to be able to test - someone in QA who is familiar with Windows shouldn’t have to throw away all that knowledge, install Linux, and start from scratch. Enter JRuby and John.

John is our tester and he is running windows. He wants to help make sure that when a user goes to http://google.com/ that a button appears with the text “Google Search”. The quick way to do this is to open his browser, navigate to http://google.com/ glance through the page for the button and confirm that its there. John has a problem though, he has 30 other test cases to run and the developers are pushing code to the frontpage several times a day; John now has to continously do this manually everytime code is touched and his test load is piling up.

So let’s help John out and install Sublime Text 2 and JRuby.

Start by downloading the 64-bit version of Sublime Text. Make sure to add the context menu when going through the install process.

Now we’ll visit the JRuby homepage and download the 64 bit installer.

Go through the installer and let JRuby set your path so you can access ruby from cmd.exe

Now when we open cmd.exe and type jruby -v we’ll be able to see that it was installed.

Now that we have our tools installed lets setup our test directory on the Desktop. Inside our testing folder we’ll create a folder called TestDemo for our tests for the Demo project.

Next we’ll open Sublime Text and go to File > Open Folder and navigate to our TestDemo folder and hit open.

Now we can continue making our directory structure inside Sublime Text. Since we’re going to use rspec we need to create a folder called spec to contain all of our tests. Right click on the TestDemo in the tree navigation and click New Folder.

Call the folder spec in the bottom title bar when it prompts you for the folder name.

Next we’ll create our Gemfile which will declare all of our dependencies - so make a file in the project root called Gemfile and put the our dependencies in it:

1source "https://rubygems.org"
2
3gem "rspec"
4gem "selenium"
5gem "selenium-webdriver"
6gem "capybara"

Once we have that file created, open cmd.exe and switch to your project’s root directory.

Type jgem install bundler to install bundler which manages ruby dependencies.

While still at the command prompt we’re going to bundle to install our dependencies:

After that finishes we need to run one last command for selenium to work properly: selenium install

We also need a spec_helper.rb file inside our spec directory.

1require "rspec"
2require "selenium"
3require "capybara/rspec"
4
5Capybara.default_driver =  :selenium

We’ve now setup our rspec folders, our Gemfile with dependencies, and installed them. Now we can write the test that will save John a ton of time.

Chrome comes with a simple tool to get XPath paths so we’re going to use that to get the XPath for the search button. Right click on the “Google Search” button and click Inspect element

Right click on the highlighted element and hit Copy XPath.

Now we’re going to make our spec file and call it homepage_spec.rb and locate it under spec\integration.

Here is a picture showing the directory structure and files:

Here is the spec file with comments explaining each part:

 1# This loads the spec helper file that we required everything in
 2require "spec_helper"
 3
 4# This is the outer level description of the test
 5# For this example it describes going to the homepage of Google.com
 6# Setting the feature type is necessary if you have
 7# Capybara specs outside of the spec\features folder
 8describe "Going to google.com", :type => :feature do
 9
10  # Context is like testing a specific component of the homepage, in this case
11  # its the search button
12  context "The search button" do
13    # This is our actual test where we give it a meaningful test description
14    it "should contain the text 'Google Search'" do
15      visit "http://google.com/" # Opens Firefox and visits google
16      button = find(:xpath, '//*[@id=gbqfba"') # find an object on the page by its XPath path
17      # This uses an rspec assertion saying that the string returned
18      # by button.text is equal to "Google Search"
19      button.text.should eq("Google Seearch")
20
21    end
22  end
23
24end

Now we can tab back to our cmd.exe prompt and run our tests! rspec spec will run all your tests under the spec folder.

Things to take note of

This example scenario is showing how to automate browser testing to do end-to-end tests on a product using rspec. This is by no means everything you can do with rspec and ruby - you can SSH, hit APIs and parse JSON, and do anything you want with the ability to make assertions.

A lot is going on in these examples - there are plenty of resources out there on google and other websites that provide more rspec examples and ruby examples.

We also showed how to add dependencies and install them using bundler. Two of the best resources for finding libraries and other gems is RubyGems and Ruby-Toolbox - the only thing to take note of is anything saying to be a native C extension (they won’t work with JRuby out of the box).

My last note is that you also need to have firefox installed as well - Selenium will work with Chrome but I’ve found it to be a hassle to setup (and unless you really need Chrome), the default of Firefox will work great.