Database Transactions 💜 Capybara

Build Status

You want your specs to use transactions for speed 🐎🐎🐎

But as soon as you try it with Capybara, things go wrong 💻💥

Don't flip tables. Use this instead.

For a detailed explanation of how this works, refer to the introductory blog post.

Support

Right now this gem automatically handles the following things:

  • ActiveRecord
  • Sequel
  • jQuery
  • Angular

Tested on Capybara 2.4.x, may not work on other major versions.

Don't see something you want? I'd love a pull request, or even just a friendly inquiry!

Setup

Add it to your Gemfile, of course:

group :test do
  gem 'transactional_capybara'
end

And then initialize it in your tests…

RSpec

In rails_helper.rb (or spec_helper.rb):

require "transactional_capybara/rspec"

Your database connection is automatically shared between threads, and all specs tagged with js: true will wait for AJAX requests to finish before continuing.

Wow. Much convenience. So relax.

All other test frameworks

Somewhere near the beginning of your test initialization:

TransactionalCapybara.share_connection

And then make sure to define a hook that will run after each Capybara test:

after :each do
  TransactionalCapybara::AjaxHelpers.wait_for_ajax(page)
end

Manually waiting for AJAX

You might have situations where you need to wait for AJAX calls to complete at times other than teardown. For example, you might have a pattern like this if you access models directly for either setup or verification of results:

visit "/page-that-fires-ajax"
Model.where(whatever).first

This can still fail! The ideal solution is to avoid direct database manipulation in integration tests. However, if you insist on doing this, you can stay safe by waiting for AJAX to complete before continuing:

visit "/page-that-fires-ajax"
TransactionalCapybara::AjaxHelpers.wait_for_ajax(page)
Model.where(whatever).first

If you'd like the helper more easily accessible, just mix the AjaxHelpers module into your test suite. In RSpec, you can do this in the config block:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.include TransactionalCapybara::AjaxHelpers
end

Or in any example group:

describe "awesome web stuff" do
  include TransactionalCapybara::AjaxHelpers
end

Now the helper is easily available:

visit "/page-that-fires-ajax"
wait_for_ajax
Model.where(whatever).first

DatabaseCleaner

For this gem to be able to help with AJAX, it needs to be invoked before DatabaseCleaner rolls back the transaction.

You should be good to go if your setup looks like this:

config.around(:each) do |example|
  DatabaseCleaner.cleaning do
    example.run
  end
end

But if you're using before/after hooks to clean, like:

before :each do
  DatabaseCleaner.start
end

after :each do
  DatabaseCleaner.clean
end

Then you need to make sure the AJAX hook runs first. Declare it before the DatabaseCleaner code and you should be set:

after :each do
  TransactionalCapybara::AjaxHelpers.wait_for_ajax(page)
end

before :each do
  DatabaseCleaner.start
end

after :each do
  DatabaseCleaner.clean
end

Sequel

If you want to have shared database connections with sequel just add the option single_threaded: true to your sequel connection in test.

Contributing

  1. Fork it
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Make your changes. Don't forget to add a test!
  4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  6. Create new Pull Request

Running the tests

cp spec/support/config.yml{.example,} # Edit as necessary
DB=sqlite rspec spec

You can run the specs with other databases as well, but you will have to create the databases and users manually first.