Capybara assertions fail under Poltergeist

Question

I have the following spec:

# MUST BE TESTED WITH JAVASCRIPT. As you can see before, it is allowing
# the Log Out link. On a real page, that element is hidden.
it "logs out a user" do
  user = login_user
  click_link user.email
  click_link "Log Out"
  assert page.has_content?('Logged out')
  assert page.has_content?('Company Profile')
end

My login_user method is in my spec_helper.rb file and is as follows:

def login_user(admin = false)
  user = FactoryGirl.create(:user, :admin => admin)
  visit login_path
  fill_in 'Email', :with => user.email
  fill_in 'Password', :with => user.password
  click_button 'Go'
  assert page.has_content?('Logged in')
  user
end

That last assert fails when I add , js: true to my spec.

And when I do a save_and_open_page right before it, Up comes the page with zero CSS and presumably no JS either since. It's not reading the assets for some reason. I thought that when you ran tests, it would read the assets just like it does in development mode. I really need help.

Answer 1

I found the answer in this question. This was EXTREMELY tricky. I still don't know exactly why this failed in the first place, but needless to say with RSpec/Capybara/PhantomJS/Poltergeist/Guard/Spork/FactoryGirl there are a LOT of moving parts.

Please follow the link to see the answer. It has to to with transactional fixtures and enabling the DatabaseCleaner gem. It doesn't do SO any good to state the answer twice, I will leave that one as the canonical answer.

UPDATE

Actually this problem has to do with how database connections are not shared under Poltergeist/PhantomJS. The guys at Plataformatec have a superior solution on their blog which does not involve the use of the DatabaseCleaner gem.

IMPORTANT NOTE

For Postgres users who are also using Spork, the blog solution will not work as stated. In other words, if you put the shared_db_connection.rb file in your spec/support directory, you will get a PG::Error connection closed message. Leave the file in spec/support but remove this line:

  ActiveRecord::Base.shared_connection = ActiveRecord::Base.connection

And instead put that in your Spork.each_run block in your spec_helper.rb file.