rails-develotest

Get rid of the Rails development environment

Motivation

When Rails projects grow, setting up a representable development environment becomes harder and harder.

1. Designers should not know about the one special case in your app making it i.e. show additional fields of your model or having a specific state.
2. Developers usually have a hard time setting up the situation to reproduce a bug.

All these problems are acually already addressed by BDD tools like Cucumber.

1. Most of the special cases should already be documented in a Feature.
2. Writing a Feature for it helps targetting the bug precisely.

But when the moment comes of styling the page / debugging, Rails' testing environment does not really help. Classes are cached, most components won't be re-evaluated even when changed, and additionally the assets from the pipeline are usually compressed for faster running tests (similar to production).

This is where Develotest comes in:

Usage

1. Write your feature, tag it with @javscript to run it in a real browser
2. Have cucumber step that pauses execution of the suite. We use binding.pry in 'When I pause' directly after the page is visited the first time
3. Set shell env variable (in bash: export DEVELOTEST=yes)
4. Run the feature, wait for the browser to pop up and pause.
5. Edit assets or ruby code in app/
6. Reload page in browser as you would normally do in development
7. Changes should be recognized.
8. repeat at 4.
9. Profit!

Installation

Add rails-develotest to your Gemfile

   gem 'rails-develotest', group: 'test'

At the bottom of your config/environments/test.rb, but within the configure block:

     # .. a lot of config.foo = 23

     Develotest.setup(config)
   end

Bundle. Done.