Ruby on Rails testing: RSpec framework

Hikari -

I've been using Rspec to configure my test automation source code and today I want to introduce Rspec testing framework to all of you.

RSpec is the most popular Ruby on Rails testing framework according to Ruby on Rails community. It is also perfectly capable to test any Ruby-written code. RSpec organization repository is neatly organized into smaller parts, such as:

  • rspec: the main RSpec package
  • rspec-core: the gem that provides the structure for writing executable examples and a customizable rspec command
  • rspec-rails: RSpec package dedicated to testing Ruby on Rails applications
  • rspec-mocks: RSpec gem that provides support for stubbing and mocking requests
  • rspec-expectations: RSpec package that exposes a readable API to express expected outcomes of code examples.

and then some more. It all builds up into a comprehensive, fully-featured Ruby and Ruby on Rails testing framework.

So what does make RSpec the best choice for testing Ruby on Rails applications?

First of all, RSpec has the best documentation, which provides a ton of helpful examples and real-life scenarios that are commonly needed to be covered by developers. This is crucial for using anything that provides its own Domain-Specific Language - DSL- as the RSpec does.

On top of that, RSpec out of the box has all the features that developers need, and all of them are highly maintained.

MiniTest on the other hand, along with its claim that everything done by RSpec might be accomplished using dedicated plugins, does not maintain them successfully, and a lot of them are broken and have not been updated in a long time.

At last, RSpec is an application, while MiniTest and Cucumber are simply frameworks. I cannot stress enough how important it is for daily usage. It does not require anything else to run the test suite, providing an end to end solution for Ruby testing.

RSpec provides a mature, well maintained and documented command-line interface program. It works exactly as one would expect it to, with the CLI help available via the --help option.

Summing it all up, RSpec is the most popular community choice for testing Ruby on Rails applications. Thanks to that, as it's open-sourced and actively maintained, a lot of solutions to the common problems are easily googleable and it grows in power rapidly.

Conclusion

As stated multiple times in this guide, RSpec is the most popular choice for testing the Ruby on Rails applications, and for a number of good reasons.Thank you for taking the time to read and think about my article.