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A Guide to Testing Rails Applications

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This guide covers built-in mechanisms offered by Rails to test your application. By referring to this guide, you will be able to:

* Understand Rails testing terminology
* Write unit, functional and integration tests for your application
* Identify other popular testing approaches and plugins

This guide won’t teach you to write a Rails application; it assumes basic familiarity with the Rails way of doing things.
1 Why Write Tests for your Rails Applications?
* Rails makes it super easy to write your tests. It starts by producing skeleton test code in the background while you are creating your models and controllers.
* By simply running your Rails tests you can ensure your code adheres to the desired functionality even after some major code refactoring.
* Rails tests can also simulate browser requests and thus you can test your application’s response without having to test it through your browser.

2 Introduction to Testing
Testing support was woven into the Rails fabric from the beginning. It wasn’t an “oh! let’s bolt on support for running tests because they’re new and cool” epiphany. Just about every Rails application interacts heavily with a database – and, as a result, your tests will need a database to interact with as well. To write efficient tests, you’ll need to understand how to set up this database and populate it with sample data.

2.1 The Three Environments
Every Rails application you build has 3 sides: a side for production, a side for development, and a side for testing.
One place you’ll find this distinction is in the config/database.yml file. This YAML configuration file has 3 different sections defining 3 unique database setups:
* production
* development
* test

This allows you to set up and interact with test data without any danger of your tests altering data from your production environment.

For example, suppose you need to test your new delete_this_user_and_every_everything_associated_with_it function. Wouldn’t you want to run this in an environment where it makes no difference if you destroy data or not?

When you do end up destroying your testing database (and it will happen, trust me), you can rebuild it from scratch according to the specs defined in the development database. You can do this by running rake db:test:prepare.

2.2 Rails Sets up for Testing from the Word Go
Rails creates a test folder for you as soon as you create a Rails project using rails new application_name. If you list the contents of this folder then you shall see:
$ ls -F test/

fixtures/ functional/ integration/ test_helper.rb unit/

The unit folder is meant to hold tests for your models, the functional folder is meant to hold tests for your controllers, and the integration folder is meant to hold tests that involve any number of controllers interacting. Fixtures are a way of organizing test data; they reside in the fixtures folder. The test_helper.rb file holds the default configuration for your tests.

2.3 The Low-Down on Fixtures
For good tests, you’ll need to give some thought to setting up test data. In Rails, you can handle this by defining and customizing fixtures.

2.3.1 What are Fixtures?
Fixtures is a fancy word for sample data. Fixtures allow you to populate your testing database with predefined data before your tests run. Fixtures are database independent and assume a single format: YAML.

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A Guide to Testing Rails Applications