--- title: End to end testing Rails with capybara slug: end-to-end-testing-rails-with-capybara published_at: 2021-07-23 14:00:30 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:04 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, you'll learn about how to setup capybara for end to end testing. We also cover how to login within the context of a test to access authenticated routes that are protected with devise. #rails #rubyonrails tags: [] views: 9063 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/end-to-end-testing-rails-with-capybara youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggnGOBe2A3o youtube_id: ggnGOBe2A3o embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ggnGOBe2A3o thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ggnGOBe2A3o/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # End to end testing Rails with capybara *Published: July 23, 2021* *Views: 9063* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggnGOBe2A3o) [![End to end testing Rails with capybara](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ggnGOBe2A3o/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggnGOBe2A3o) ## Description In this episode, you'll learn about how to setup capybara for end to end testing. We also cover how to login within the context of a test to access authenticated routes that are protected with devise. #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript hey what's up welcome back to our series about testing we're building out some tooling to test our rails application in this episode we're going to talk specifically about system tests aka end to end test aka capybara selenium webdriver like all of these different tools that go together to make it so that you can sort of just do a full stack test where you're sort of browsing around in an automated fashion through your application and making assertions about what's happening to the database and to your application these can be combined really nicely with model tests or just uh sort of unit tests in isolation with different things that you're you've got on your back end to round out your test suite and so these are generally a little bit heavy-handed and will take a little bit longer to run so you don't want too many i guess maybe would be the the caution but let's yeah let's just jump in and take a look so the first thing we want to do is go into our gem file here and in the test group i want to add gem capybara and then we'll say bundle install this will set up capybara to so that we can run some request specs then the next thing we want to do is say maybe we'll say rails g r spec system we're gonna call it a system test for um maybe for the company's view so if we take a look here on the company show page we have a tool for refreshing the data when we click this refresh data button it should enqueue a couple of jobs we've also got like a bunch of other data that's on this page that we could make assertions that it's actually showing up so let's make the very first simple test be that we can at least load this page and read that the name of the company is showing on the page somewhere so let's do that first and we'll just call this companies as our system test all right so we'll open up this company's spec and our very first test we'll say like it loads the show page with the company name and we'll say we're going to create a company and we're going to say create or company is equal to create company and we can give it a specific name here even name is like uh test code and then we can say we want to visit the company pay the company path for that company and we want to assert that expected the page dot has to have content test co dot so very simple very simple test right so we want to visit this path for this company that we just created and then we're going to make assumptions or assertions about the page so we've got our setup we've got our exercise and then we've have our assertions again here at the bottom so let's run this test all right so when we're looking at this error here we see expected to find the text test.co in form for companies insiders blah blah blah this is actually like the menu and then we see view notifications uh and then down here we see email password remember me sign up forgot your password so this is actually returning the authentication page because that company's route requires you to be logged in now this can be a point where it gets kind of tricky depending on how you've implemented your authentication system because you might have to like set cookies or mess around with the session in order to uh to assert things about pages where you require authentication in this case i am using the uh the devise gem devise we have another episode on this channel about setting up device for authentication and if you're using the device gem this actually ends up being pretty simple because we can go to our um our rails helper i believe yeah and at the bottom in like the same way that we included those factory bot methods we can also include some warden test helpers so we're gonna say warden uh test helpers and that will make it so that we have a login as method that we can use uh when we're logging in um when we're logging in in tests so let's go back to our test and we here we can say login as and we can pass in the user or like create user and so that should create a brand new user using the user factory and then log them in all right so let's run this again so we're going to run our test okay and we see here that we got um this uh webmock we got a webmock error so we had wedmock we have med we installed webmock in an earlier episode you can head back and check that out and we see this unregistered request to api.stripe.com v1 prices so it's actually trying to like look up some prices and i'm recalling that what the way that we implement the um the billing solution for our application is that once you're authenticated um we are going to assert that you are a subscribed user and so as part of that subscription we might redirect you to a page where you have to like then um go and pay in order to become a subscribed customer and so i think they're we're getting redirected in this case because this the user factory by default users so this user factory by default is just setting the email and password but it's not doing anything about the status for being a subscribed user so a subscribe user is sort of like a special case for a user and so in this case what i want to do is actually create like a sub factory of user or a nested factory that has a that is subscribed and so if i create a new factory here for a subscribed user and then i can set their subscription status so let's look at the user model real quick and the way that we're telling if a user is subscribed is by checking the subscription status field and ensuring that it is active so here what we want to do is say that the subscription status is active and that should be returned for subscribed users so now i can use this name in our test as the factory for creating the user that we want to log in as and that will successfully set both its email password and also its subscription status so let's go back over here and say subscribed user there's other ways that you can do this too you can do with you can work with traits so you can say like create user with a subscription or something that would create it with its subscribed traits but this is the way that i know how to do it okay so now it's successfully loading that page let's go to the company show page uh comp show and let's actually just remove the the company name temporarily so that we can make sure that this is actually passing our test so we're going all the way out to the template to the view template for our company show page remove the name so that we can rerun our test and we see that it is now at least showing us the right stuff so now we can put the company name back in there run our test and it should pass okay that's pretty cool this application doesn't have very much crud and so the only other thing that i can think of testing as part of companies is that the when they click on that refresh data button that it will actually refresh the data and fetch the data from um or like it'll at least enqueue the jobs that this refresh data method is calling so let's go look at our controller again companies controller here so we have this update method which is called when they click refresh data and that is in queuing these two jobs one is to fetch the prices for the company that's one api endpoint on alpha vantage the other is to fetch the overview which is a separate api endpoint and so when inside of our test here we can say like it enqueues jobs to refresh data and in this case again we need to log in and again we need to create a company and we need to visit the same path but now we're going to do something different here and we're going to say after we visit the path we also want to click on and i keep the so this is the button we want to click on refresh data refresh data and it's as simple as just passing in the string or text value for what's on the button you can say click button to be more specific about a button but here i'm just saying click on because i don't have any other refresh data content on the page so that should work and then i want to assert that these two things were enqueued so like um i want to expect that this job dot to have been enqueued and also the company overview job so those are the two things i want to assert i'm actually just going to comment them out now and then run our test and it should fail because we are not actually enqueuing those but our test again is going to actually go click around on the page and so here we have our failure expected it to enqueue exactly one jobs but in cube zero so let's comment these back in and then we can run this again all right now it's in queueing our jobs so now we have a test these are like e to e test so you can do things like fill in forms again this application is does not have very much credit just has that one button but you can go and like fill in form fields and yeah you can upload files and do all kinds of fun stuff with capybara but hopefully this will get you started especially if you're using devise knowing this login as trick can come in handy and again we're mixing it with our factory bot setup that we did in a previous episode so this uh this sort of rounds out all of the testing that i want to show with rspec and how i generally will test all of my applications in a follow-up we might go through the process of how you set github actions set up github actions to run your r-spec tests but yeah until then thanks so much for watching and we'll see in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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