Adding rspec to sinatra

In the previous post I showed how to deploy a sample sinatra app on Cloud Foundry using rake, and now I'm going to add rspec tests to the app.

The first step is to add the rspec gem to your Gemfile and run bundle

source "http://rubygems.org"

gem 'sinatra'

group :test do
  gem 'rspec'
end

Next you need to create the spec directory and add the spec_helper.rb file

require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', 'app.rb')

require 'sinatra'
require 'rack/test'

# setup test environment
set :environment, :test
set :run, false
set :raise_errors, true
set :logging, false

def app
  Sinatra::Application
end

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.include Rack::Test::Methods
end

This is for a classic style sinatra app, if you are using a modular app, you need to make some slight modifications for it to work. I'll show how to do that in a later post.

And finally you are ready to create the spec file that corresponds to the app.rb

require 'spec_helper'

describe "Sinatra App" do

  it "should respond to GET" do
    get '/'
    last_response.should be_ok
    last_response.body.should match(/It works!/)
  end

end

I usually don't use rspec for integration tests, for that I use cucumber. I normally use rspec for unit testing, but since this is a sample app and I don't have any models to test, I included this test for completeness sake. I'll write another blog post how to add cucumber tests to this sample sinatra app later.
To make life easier, I've added a rake task to run the rspec tests

require 'rspec/core/rake_task'

desc "run specs"
RSpec::Core::RakeTask.new

And then I've updated the deployment task to require the rspec task, so we can't update the application unless it passes all tests.

namespace :vmc do
  desc "update cloud foundry deployment"
  task :update => [:bundle, :spec] do
    sh "vmc update #{VMC_APP_NAME}"
  end
end

I've created a github repository for this app to make it easier for you to use it as a template.