Use case:
- A client wants to be sure that some critical functionality is running in their production environments. Example: their products are showing in their web shop.
Plan:
- Create some Smoke tests against production server
- Create a Jenkins job which executes them every hour, sending a mail if this fails
In this post we will see how to create these Smoke tests with Rspec/Capybara/Mechanize. On server you can have deployed whatever web technology (Java, PHP, Node ...). Required gems:
- Rspec: testing Ruby environment
- Capybara: simple DSL for simulating user interaction with a web application
- Capibara-mechanize: Capybara driver which uses mechanize to create remote server requests
So that in your Gemfile (asuming you use Bundler to manage your dependencies):
gem 'capybara'
gem 'capybara-mechanize'
The specification:
require 'spec_helper'
WEBSITE_URL = "http://www.swordshop.com"
feature "Critical features on: #{WEBSITE_URL}" , smoke: true do
background do
Capybara.run_server = false
Capybara.app_host = WEBSITE_URL
require 'capybara/mechanize'
Capybara.default_driver = :mechanize
visit root_path
end
scenario "root is up" do
page.should have_content("Best Swords in the world")
end
scenario "products url is showing products" do
within("nav") { click_on "Products" }
page.should have_css(".product")
end
end
Just a little great detail: include smoke tag in your excluding filters, so that this will not be mixed with your unit and functional tests:
config.filter_run_excluding :smoke
And you can allways call these tests with the command:
rspec --tag smoke