Culerity and Celerity, JavaScript enabled testing in Cucumber

fugufish — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:02:30 +0000

As you may know, testing JavaScript inesnsive applications using Cucumber can be a pain. There are several ways to handle this; Selenium, Watir and the like. The easiest way I have found however is by using Celerity a jRuby API for htmlUnit, a fully functional headless browser that completely supports JavaScript, and you don’t have to serve your application on jRuby to use it!. I was able to get Celerity to play nice duruing Cucumber tests by doing the following: First, you will need of course jRuby. The Culerity gem will start up Celerity in the jRuby environment, and proxy the actual browser through it. Download jRuby and extract it to wherever you want it located. In my case I put it in /opt, and set your PATH accordingly.

export PATH=$HOME/jruby/bin:$PATH

Next install the Celerity gem in jRuby (we are using the github version rather than the ruby forge version, as it provides a later version):

jruby -S gem install jarib-celerity --source=http://gems.github.com

Now install the Culerity gem. This provides the interface between Celerity and your environment without forcing you to run in jRuby

 gem install langalex-culerity --source http://gems.github.com

Place this in your test environment:

# config/environments/test.rb
 
config.gem "langalex-culerity", :lib =&gt; false

I call :lib => false here to avoid loading the gem. This is done in the file generated by culerity. Finally remove features/steps/webrat_steps.rb as it will conflict with Culerity, and run:

script/generate culerity

Enjoy! Culerity should have very similar syntax to webrat, however keep in mind you may see some differences that you may need to adjust.

PMA Media Group» javascript

Culerity and Celerity, JavaScript enabled testing in Cucumber