legacy testing with capybara/mechanize

February 16, 2011

I spent a little time working on some tests for a legacy web app that we plan to re-write in Ruby. Before the big re-write, I thought it would be wise to write some integration tests to call the app via http and verify responses. I wanted to use vanilla http and not have the overhead of launching a browser and was frustrated that Capybara didn’t have a driver to suit my needs.

I started down the path of writing tests from scratch using Net::HTTP, but figured that there had to be someone else who had run into this before. @kakutani told me about capybara-mechanize which seems to be exactly what I need.

Here’s my first really basic experiment using RSpec to test a well-known web site:

require 'capybara/rspec'
require 'capybara/mechanize'
Capybara.default_driver = :mechanize

describe 'web app' do
  include Capybara

  before do
    Capybara.app_host = "http://www.google.com"
  end

  it "has a copyright" do
    visit '/'
    page.should have_content('© 2011')
  end

end

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