Rails 4, RSpec, Capybara & webkit_server

Question

I'm trying to use Rspec with capybara-webkit on a Rails 4 project and I'm getting an error to go with Capybara.default_host not being set properly.

The webkit_server is installed properly and is in PATH.

I've added the following gems to Gemfile:

group :test do
  gem 'rspec-rails', "~> 2.12"
  gem 'factory_girl'
  gem 'capybara', '2.0.3'  # capybara-webkit works with this version
  gem 'capybara-webkit'
  gem 'database_cleaner', :git => 'git://github.com/bmabey/database_cleaner.git'
  gem 'email_spec'
end

My spec_helper.rb contains amongst other things:

require 'capybara'
require "capybara-webkit"

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.include(EmailSpec::Helpers)
  config.include(EmailSpec::Matchers)

  config.include Capybara::DSL, :type => :request

  config.before(:suite) do
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
  end
  config.before(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.start

  end
  config.after(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.start
  end
end

Capybara.default_host = '127.0.0.1:3001'
Capybara.run_server = true
Capybara.javascript_driver = :webkit

Here is my test:

require 'spec_helper'

feature 'A feature' do

  include Capybara::DSL

  scenario 'first scenario', :js => true do

    visit login_url
    page.current_url.should eq('http://127.0.0.1:3001/login')

    ...

  end

end

The error I'm getting is:

[16:40:24] paul@Pro2:web $ rspec spec/features/my_spec.rb
Run options: include {:locations=>{"./spec/features/my_spec.rb"=>[165]}}

F

Failures:

  1) A feature - first scenario
     Failure/Error: page.current_url.should eq('http://127.0.0.1:3001/login')

       expected: "http://127.0.0.1:3001/login"
            got: "http://example.iana.org/"

       (compared using ==)
     # ./spec/features/my_spec.rb:8:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'

Finished in 1.69 seconds
1 example, 1 failure

Failed examples:

rspec ./spec/features/my_spec.rb:8 # A feature - first scenario

Randomized with seed 54529

Looks like it's using example.org as the hostname which is the default for the test environment.

Any suggestions?

UPDATE: Turns out this is not a bug but it's by design. The solution is to never use *_url but *_path (absolute vs. relative):

visit login_path
page.current_path.should eq(login_path)

Answer 1

This problem is not specific to Rails 4. I met this problem before in Rails 3.

I tried several settings but finally found the best solution is to change all url to path. For example:

visit login_path
page.current_path.should eq('/login')

Actually we don't need adding host to make this test meaningful. By this way your tests will not depend on any server they are running. No matter yours, your peers, CI servers etc.