Adrian Valenzuela

Posted on Jan 6, 2022 • Updated on Jan 8, 2022

Setup RSpec on a fresh Rails 7 project

#rails #rspec #testing #ruby

Photo by Jonathan Bean on Unsplash

Installing RSpec, FactoryBot, Faker gems and configuring for testing environment.

Using Ruby 3.0.1 + Rails 7.0.0 at the time of writing this article

Let's get right to it...

Start a fresh project

rails new projectname -d postgresql
cd projectname
git add -A
git commit -m "initial commit"

rails db:create
rails s

Install gems

git checkout -b rspec

In Gemfile add...

group :development, :test do
  # See https://guides.rubyonrails.org/debugging_rails_applications.html#debugging-with-the-debug-gem
  gem "debug", platforms: %i[ mri mingw x64_mingw ]
  gem "rspec-rails"
  gem "factory_bot_rails"
  gem "faker"
end

Back in terminal/command line...

bundle install
rails g rspec:install

Configure gems

Create 'support' directory in 'spec' directory and create two files

spec/support/factory_bot.rb
spec/support/chrome.rb

And then one file in the spec directory for factories.

spec/factories.rb

Configure FactoryBot

# spec/support/factory_bot.rb

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.include FactoryBot::Syntax::Methods
end

Configure driver

# spec/support/chrome.rb

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before(:each, type: :system) do
    if ENV["SHOW_BROWSER"] == "true"
      driven_by :selenium_chrome
    else
      driven_by :selenium, using: :headless_chrome, screen_size: [1400, 1400]
    end
  end
end

Require support files in rails_helper.rb

# spec/rails_helper.rb

require_relative 'support/factory_bot'
require_relative 'support/chrome'

When you generate a User model (or any model) RSpec will generate a factory for you in your factories.rb file.
You can modify it to look like this.

# spec/factories.rb

FactoryBot.define do
  factory(:user) do
    email { Faker::Internet.email }
    password { Faker::Internet.password }
  end
end

it "should run a test" do...

Run rspec command in the terminal and you should see it run and output some green text.

-> rspec
No examples found.

Finished in 0.00038 seconds (files took 0.94577 seconds to load)
0 examples, 0 failures

Finish up

git add -A
git commit -m "add rspec"
git checkout main
git merge rspec
git branch -D rspec
git push # assuming you have a repo online somewhere

Top comments (7)

Peter Sankauskas • Mar 22 '22

This is fantastic, thank you!

I noticed in test/test_helper.rb there is a line to help speed up testing. How did you do the equivalent of:

parallelize(workers: :number_of_processors)

Adrian Valenzuela • Mar 29 '22

It looks like there is a gem and a video tutorial that can assist with that: github.com/grosser/parallel_tests and railscasts.com/episodes/413-fast-t... ..

From what I understand it's not built into RSpec which you can refer to this GitHub issue for starters: github.com/rspec/rspec-rails/issue...

Thorsten Hirsch • Jan 7 '22

Now you can also use Ruby 3.1 with Rails 7.0.1.

Gustavo Burckhardt • May 5 '23 • Edited

thanks for this, but for me it shows" invoke factory_bot File unchanged! The supplied flag value not found! spec/factories.rb" every tirme I try to create a model/scaffold.

Adrian Valenzuela • May 18 '23

I need to update this post. I remember now that being an issue...

Just totally forget and remove that file: spec/factories.rb ...and now when you generate a model or scaffold it will run smoothly (I hope!) ^_^

If you created a model like bin/rails g model cake name:string before you deleted that spec/factories.rb file...then you can either start over and first destroy your model (bin/rails d model cake ...note the d flag and you don't have to pass in your attributes) and then just generate it again...or if you are in too deep and already began working with your model you can just generate the factory for your model like this: bin/rails g factory_bot:model Cake name:string. I believe do you do have to pass in your attributes or you can manually add them after it creates the factory file for you.