Engines in Rails are awesome for many reasons. Here's a good article about them.
Setting up the typical Rails BDD testing environment with engines is a bit tricky. Rspec in particular is challenging. There's no single source for how to do it, so over a day I compiled knowledge from various places on the Internet and worked through bugs until it was shiny and issue-free. This template.rb is a result of that work.
Save yourself some hair-pulling induced baldness and use this template.
Click on each individual file on Github and then copy & paste it into your favorite editor, like Notepad.
Just kidding. git clone this repository to somewhere that you store code and use it from there.
When creating a rails engine, use -T to disable test creation. A dummy app will be automatically generated in the correct place in the rspec recipe. You can also use -B to skip bundler, because this package does it for you, but it won't hurt anything if you forget.
Example usage:
rails plugin new engine_name --mountable -B -T -m ./rails-engine-spec-template/template.rb
This engine template was tested with Ruby 2.1 and Rails 4.0.4, though I don't see any reason it won't work on earlier or later versions. File an issue if you have one.
Quirks:
- awesome_print and hirb both require some extra setup. See the pry FAQ for instructions.
- When you generate a factory with factory_girl, it doesn't properly use the engine namespace. You have to manually edit the
class:attribute to something like:class => "EngineName::MyClass", but thankfully you only have to do this once. - When you use any Rspec tests that use routes, you have to specify
use_route: :engine_nameon any calls. For exampleget '/', use_route: :my_engine. It's annoying, but that's what the official docs say. I have figured out yet if you can safely alias the methods in the engine.
This is a pretty standard Rails BDD setup, though it's opinionated because it's what I want to use. If you don't like it, you can... disable any of the recipes by editing the template.rb file and removing it from the RECIPES array.
- rspec-rails
- capybara
- factory_girl_rails
- ffaker
- guard-rspec
- guard-rails
- thin
- pry-doc
- pry-rails
- better_errors (and binding_of_caller)
- awesome_print (setup: How can I use awesome_print with Pry?)
- hirb (setup: How can I use the Hirb gem with Pry?)
- Rails Engine Testing with Rspec, Capybara, and Factory Girl - The original guide this was based on, which was 70% of the way there.
- Open Sourcing with Rails Engines - Good information about why you should use engines.
- Rails Guides: Engines - A good (but incomplete) resource on using engines.
I'm Brian Bugh and I made this. Look at me on the Internet!
Fork and pull request.
This is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.