Assets are not loaded during capybara/rspec spec

Question

I'm using rspec, capybara and launchy to test my web application.

Here's my spec:

require 'spec_helper'

describe "Routes" do
    describe "GET requests" do
        it "GET /root_path" do
            visit root_path
        page.should have_content("All of our statuses")
        click_link "Post a New Status"
        page.should have_content("New status")
        fill_in "status_name", with: "Jimmy balooney"
        fill_in "status_content", with: "Oh my god I am going insaaaaaaaaane!!!"
        click_button "Create Status"
        page.should have_content("Status was successfully created.")
        click_link "Statuses"
        page.should have_content("All of our statuses")
        page.should have_content("Jimmy balooney")
        page.should have_content("Oh my god I am going insaaaaaaaaane!!! ")
        save_and_open_page
        end
    end
end

My .rspec

--color
--order default

and my spec_helper.rb:

# This file is copied to spec/ when you run 'rails generate rspec:install'
ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'test'
require File.expand_path("../../config/environment", __FILE__)
require 'rspec/rails'
require 'rspec/autorun'
require 'capybara/rspec'

# Requires supporting ruby files with custom matchers and macros, etc,
# in spec/support/ and its subdirectories.
Dir[Rails.root.join("spec/support/**/*.rb")].each { |f| require f }

# Checks for pending migrations before tests are run.
# If you are not using ActiveRecord, you can remove this line.
ActiveRecord::Migration.check_pending! if defined?(ActiveRecord::Migration)

RSpec.configure do |config|
  # ## Mock Framework
  #
  # If you prefer to use mocha, flexmock or RR, uncomment the appropriate line:
  #
  # config.mock_with :mocha
  # config.mock_with :flexmock
  # config.mock_with :rr
  config.before(:suite) do
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
    DatabaseCleaner.clean_with(:truncation)
  end

  config.before(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.start
    DatabaseCleaner.clean
  end

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

  # Remove this line if you're not using ActiveRecord or ActiveRecord fixtures
  config.fixture_path = "#{::Rails.root}/spec/fixtures"

  # If you're not using ActiveRecord, or you'd prefer not to run each of your
  # examples within a transaction, remove the following line or assign false
  # instead of true.
  config.use_transactional_fixtures = true

  # If true, the base class of anonymous controllers will be inferred
  # automatically. This will be the default behavior in future versions of
  # rspec-rails.
  config.infer_base_class_for_anonymous_controllers = false

  # Run specs in random order to surface order dependencies. If you find an
  # order dependency and want to debug it, you can fix the order by providing
  # the seed, which is printed after each run.
  #     --seed 1234
  config.order = "random"
end

If you look back at my spec, you'll see a rspec spec that uses capybara to browse my application, and finishes by calling the launchy gem's save_and_open_page method to open this final page in a browser for a human to look at. At this final page, however, there is no javascript or css displayed, just pure HTML.

Does anyone have any ideas why this would be? I want to test javascript, and would prefer it if all assets were loaded.

Answer 1

Inside config.before(:suite) do

add:

%x[bundle exec rake assets:precompile]

to precompile your Rails assets then in your test.rb environment file add:

config.action_controller.asset_host = "file://#{::Rails.root}/public"
config.assets.prefix = 'assets_test'

to point to the location of the precompiled assets. Now you can use assets when you run Capybara. Note: make sure if you are using git to ignore that new folder.