--- title: Setup Rspec with Ruby on Rails slug: setup-rspec-with-ruby-on-rails published_at: 2021-07-07 17:00:02 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:05 +0000 summary: description: In this episode you'll learn how to install and configure the rspec-rails gem for automated RSpec testing with Ruby on Rails. #rails #rubyonrails tags: [rspec-rails, setup rspec with ruby on rails, setup rspec with rails, rspec and rails, ruby rspec, install rspec, install rspec-rails, rspec generators] views: 24387 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/setup-rspec-with-ruby-on-rails youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jX-FLcznDE youtube_id: 2jX-FLcznDE embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/2jX-FLcznDE thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2jX-FLcznDE/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Setup Rspec with Ruby on Rails *Published: July 07, 2021* *Views: 24387* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jX-FLcznDE) [![Setup Rspec with Ruby on Rails](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2jX-FLcznDE/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jX-FLcznDE) ## Description In this episode you'll learn how to install and configure the rspec-rails gem for automated RSpec testing with Ruby on Rails. #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript hey welcome back in this episode we're going to talk about testing so in this previous uh episode we talked about ruby blocks procs and lambdas and shamu gum reached out and said hey it would be great to see some content about rails api request specs with r spec for both controller and model thanks in advance so here what i wanted to do was first we got to go through the process of just setting up our spec in a rails application so there are a couple of tools that i like to use in any production app and so i want to just go through the motions of just first adding those tools and talking about sort of the bare minimums and the first is r-spec rails so the r-spec rails gem is a rails specific uh wrapper around the r-spec tools and it gives you some additional functionality uh on top of our spec for like generating certain things so this is the tool that i use for rails testing now by default when you set up a rails application if you don't skip tests then your rails app will come with mini tests which is just another test framework that is different from rspec now our spec in my opinion is a little bit more common in industry even though rails defaults to minitest and both both have tools to do all the testing that you might want to do i just prefer our spec and so this is the tool i use the other tool that i use is factory bot this used to be called factory girl i think it's a tool by thotbot yup so here's how you can transition from factory girl um it is a tool by f thoughtbot that provides factories for creating your data models and working with your data models instead of using fixtures so fixtures are basically just like hard-coded yaml files that you would set up and that are loaded as kind of like the whole world of your database at once and instead you can use fixtures or i'm sorry factories and a factory is a class that is responsible for creating instances of objects and so this factory bot tool is really handy when you want to either build and not persist something to the database or create something that you're going to then use in your test and then we'll also talk about customizing the the generator so there's a bit here that happens automatically with our spec in our spec rails that we probably don't want the defaults for so let's jump into our code this is we're going to use our form 4 tracker app that we've been building on all right so the very first thing we want to do is jump into our gem file and add a gem here so under the i have a group for development and tests and i have a group for development but i also want to add a group that is just for test mode and in here i'm going to add the gem rspec rails all right now we'll go bundle install this will install that um that r spec rails gem next we can say rails g r spec colon install this will create a couple of files for us that we'll need it'll create a dot rspec file where we can configure what the test runner looks like and spits out it'll create a spec directory with a spec helper and a rails helper because we already have existing models in this application now we can say like rails g r spec colon model user to create a a model test for the user class now this is one of the tools for generating specs for us automatically this will create a file here in spec models called the user spec and now if we wanted to run this we could say r spec spec slash models user spec and that should run the the test now by default these are created with a little bit of a wrapper around them in order to just show you that a test is pending now when i've run this i actually run into my very first error that is unexpected and it says that in uh while it was trying to run it didn't find uri in in this initializer for rescue.rb so we have an initializer setup that is completely unrelated to our tests but here at the top we're saying if we're in development mode then set up rescue locally otherwise set up rescue based on an environment variable but this is really only supposed to run in production so we actually can do an else if rails.m dot production there's a couple different things that you might run into when it's the first time that you're using test the test environment so this is one example of those that i've run into now i can say r spec spec you can also just keep it short and say i want to run all the tests in this directory by saying our spec spec in the spec directory will have several tests right now i just have my one file here for user spec and so what i can do now is open up that user spec model and in here you'll notice that we're doing a couple things first we're requiring this rails helper which is going to include the gems and a couple a little bit of setup for us then we are using the rspec.describe method we're passing in the class that we're describing and then specifying the type of test this is so this is a model test and then inside of this do end we have a we're calling pending and passing in this uh passing in the string that's just saying this is a pending test file that no one has actually edited so you would come in here and you would delete this and add your own rspec test so we'll have a another episode all about our spec testing syntax but for now we can just say like it can run tests basically and we'll just get this up and running and we're going to say expect false dot 2 be true because we want the test to fail now we can again run r spec spec and we'll see that the test fails right so now it's it shows us the actual failure that we expect so the user can run tests so the user was there the subject class that was part of our user spec and then can run tests was the content in our it statement and then this is telling us exactly the code that we that we wrote that had our expectation or our sort of assertion about that code that we were writing and we got or we expected true but we got false so this is our actual value and this is our expected value so they're a little bit different like we're expecting and then you pass in like the actual value to be the expected value which is kind of an interesting way to think about it because what you're passing in to expect is not actually the expected but assertions across all different test frameworks are going to work the same you're going to have some way to say like here is the thing that i created with my my production code and it should match this hard-coded or asserted like actual thing in your test so that's a really common pattern all right so now if we want to like go over to our user spec and then modify this test so it was like expected false to be false and then we can run it now when you're when you're running from the terminal and you have to write out our spec spec every single time it can be pretty tedious right so running like r spec spec even if you use the up arrow to run a specific test it can be pretty small pretty slow so something that i really recommend doing pretty early is um configuring your editor so that you can just go directly from user spec here i have um i have i think it's test bim test maybe yeah so i'm using this plug-in vim test vim test and this allows me to in my vim rc um test um yeah so i have leader leader h and leader l set up to run the nearest test or run the entire test file okay so these are tools that come from bim test and so if i do leader l in my case it's space l and i'm inside of this file then it will run all the tests in this file and it's when you're when you're implementing a test driven workflow or when you're trying to write automated tests it can be excruciating if you need to like switch out of the context of the editor into some other terminal window or something just to run your tests you want to get that feedback loop as tight as possible so that you're running your tests as tight as fast as possible and so here we have one example and zero failures this means this little dot here isn't it is like the output for when the test is running and it passes um so that is that's how we can that's how i tend to run the test is just directly inside the editor so you might see me just like do something and then all of a sudden the tests are running that's because i'm using spacebar l or spacebar h to run either one test or all the tests in that file so if i do spacebar h now you'll notice that the the execution here has a colon five at the end so in your in your own editor or you're in test in your test framework right if you had r spec spec and then models user spec this will run the entire file and all this all the tests in that one file but if you wanted to specify a specific file you can do colon five or something or colon and the line number at the end and that will just run the test that's like closest to that line number so you might be able to edit your or configure your editor so that it runs tests like this um but whatever okay so that's how you install r-spec r-spec rails now if i wanted to just generate a a brand new model for instance right and if i say like rails g model dummy now this is going to run the underlying rails generator to create these two files and this is pretty convenient right because if we're creating a model we want both a migration and we want the model file but it's also really handy if we also have the tests so it would be great if like when we're generating the model file it also generated a spec file for us right so if we uh let's remove this model and what we can do is go into our application config and set it up so that when it's running generators so let's open up here and go to config application.rb and down here uh we can say config dot okay so config.generator system test is nil so it's not generating uh system tests but we want to say config.generators do g and then we can say g dot test framework is equal to r spec if we were again to generate that dummy model you'll see that there was two additional files created this r spec um our spec was invoked as part of the generation flow this is the test framework that was invoked and that our spec generator created this dummy spec file so now we it automatically created both the model file and this dummy spec file so that's cool that's great now let's talk about the case where we wanted to say like rails g scaffold and maybe we wanted to add some like commenting system in here so if we say comment right that will create the controller it'll create the model the migrations it creates a whole bunch of stuff for us right and so here at the top we get our migration we get a comment model we get the r spec uh for the comment model and we're also going to get a bunch of other stuff so as it's scaffolding the controller our spec will also create a request a request spec it will also create specs for each of the views for edit new create show etc and it will also create a routing spec i have almost never i i've actually never written a routing spec and i've very very rarely ever written if ever a view spec so these these kinds of specs are being generated but you'll probably never actually write them in practice at least in my experience helpers i also very rarely actually implement a helper and so i don't actually use the helper specs um and so there's a lot of files that are being generated for us that we might not actually ever use and so one thing that you can do is go back into that application html erb thing and we can disable generation of many of the different specs so this uh test framework method here can actually be called not just as a setter but we can we can pass in a bunch of arguments so we can pass in the test framework and then we can also pass in some configuration about the test framework so if we look back at the rails docs here for the for customizing generators uh if we have test framework yeah so within our test framework we can tell it that we wanted to generate fixtures or factories or other other things i believe we can pass in um yeah that we don't want it to generate fixtures that we don't want it to generate the spec helpers etc so let's see spec i'm sorry helper yeah okay so let's just let's just disable all of the ones that i always disable so we don't need any fixtures we don't need any view specs we don't need helper specs we don't need routing specs now some of the others might be handy or might come in handy so i'm just going to leave the rest in these are the main ones that i wanted to get rid of uh were these three because i i never write those and so those those are the ones that we'll leave out okay so now if we again uh let's see rails d scaffold uh comment so let's clean up the comment and we'll clean up dummy railsd model dummy now if we were to say again rails g scaffold uh comment it should only create the files um for the for the generators that we left in so let's see so we invoked our spec here we got our model spec that's important that's always a really common thing that we'll want to use uh we got a request spec that can come in handy we don't have any helpers that's great and okay so now we're now we're good so now we have a model spec and a request spec yep i think that's a great start and that's also how i would generally set up our spec all right so let's end it there and in the next episode we'll go through and set up factory bot so that we can actually like create some factory objects in our tests so we'll see you in a bit [Music] --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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