Ruby on Rails

Cucumber Rails support built-in, and I really recommend using Webrat
in the step definitions. Here is how to get you started.

Install Cucumber, Webrat and RSpec

You can use both Rubygems or Rails’ plugin mechanism. We usually recommend Rubygems. You can read a longer discussion here.

Using Rubygems

The easiest is to install everything as a gem.

[sudo] gem install rspec rspec-rails cucumber webrat

important: Cucumber 0.1.12 and up depends on Webrat 0.3.2.1, which as of this writing is not yet released as a gem. Install Webrat as a plugin until the gem is updated or grab Webrat’s source code and build the gem yourself. Make sure you install Nokogiri as well as this is a Webrat dependency.

script/plugin install git://github.com/brynary/webrat.git

Ubuntu/Debian users: You need to install the following libs for nokogiri to install properly (from webrat home) :

sudo apt-get install libxslt1-dev libxml2-dev

If you use gems, you have to make sure everybody on the team has the same version of the gems installed. Also note that you don’t have to use rspec and rspec-rails and webrat, but we suggest you use them unless you have good reasons to use something else.

Using plugins

Another option is to install the libraries as Rails plugins. If you use Git for your Rails app, here is how to do that:

git submodule add git://github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber.git vendor/plugins/cucumber
git submodule add git://github.com/brynary/webrat.git vendor/plugins/webrat
git submodule add git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec.git vendor/plugins/rspec
git submodule add git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec-rails.git vendor/plugins/rspec-rails

If your own Rails code is not in Git, just replace submodule add with clone.
If you’re behind a proxy, try to replace git:// with http:// and set the http_proxy environment variable.

Install dependencies

The plugins’ dependencies must be installed separately:

gem install term-ansicolor treetop diff-lcs nokogiri

Behind a firewall?

As a last resort, download tarballs from GitHub.

Create Your Rails Project

Create the rails project with the following command:

rails YourProjectName

Don’t forget to create the corresponding databases.

Write all commands in the next steps from this project’s path.

Bootstrap Cucumber

You’ll need a Rake task and a couple of files that configure Cucumber for use with Ruby on Rails and Webrat.
You create these with:

ruby script/generate cucumber

Take a look at the generated files. If you need to, you can tweak them later.

Start a feature

It’s really, really recommended that you write your features by hand – in collaboration with your
customer / business analyst / domain expert / interaction designer. However, to get you started (and so you can see how to use
Webrat), you can use the feature generator to generate the first few features:

ruby script/generate feature Frooble name color description

This will generate a simple plain text feature with associated steps. Don’t get addicted to this
generator – you’re better off writing these by hand in the long run.

Run features

Just run:

rake features

This should result in failing scenarios, because you haven’t written any code yet (I hope).

Now it’s time to write some code, or generate some. Try this:

script/generate rspec_scaffold Frooble name:string color:string description:text
rake db:migrate
rake features

See Running Features for more info.

View spec redundancy

Since I recommend you verify outcomes (Then steps) by looking at the HTML, you might end up having some degree
of redundancy with view specs. I recommend you delete generated view specs if you run into too much maintenance
headaches and rely on the features instead of view specs. However, in some cases it can be handy to use both.