rake cucumber and rake spec always use "develop" environment

Question

My rake tasks for running Cucumber and RSpec tests are always using my development environment.

Here are the relevant config files:

RAILS_ROOT/config/environments/cucumber.rb

# Edit at your own peril - it's recommended to regenerate this file
# in the future when you upgrade to a newer version of Cucumber.

# IMPORTANT: Setting config.cache_classes to false is known to
# break Cucumber's use_transactional_fixtures method.
# For more information see https://rspec.lighthouseapp.com/projects/16211/tickets/165
config.cache_classes = true

# Log error messages when you accidentally call methods on nil.
config.whiny_nils = true

# Show full error reports and disable caching
config.action_controller.consider_all_requests_local = true
config.action_controller.perform_caching             = false

# Disable request forgery protection in test environment
config.action_controller.allow_forgery_protection    = false

# Tell Action Mailer not to deliver emails to the real world.
# The :test delivery method accumulates sent emails in the
# ActionMailer::Base.deliveries array.
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :test

# config.gem 'cucumber-rails',   :lib => false, :version => '>=0.3.2' unless File.directory?(File.join(Rails.root, 'vendor/plugins/cucumber-rails'))
# config.gem 'database_cleaner', :lib => false, :version => '>=0.5.0' unless File.directory?(File.join(Rails.root, 'vendor/plugins/database_cleaner'))
# config.gem 'capybara',         :lib => false, :version => '>=0.3.5' unless File.directory?(File.join(Rails.root, 'vendor/plugins/capybara'))
# config.gem 'rspec',            :lib => false, :version => '>=1.3.0' unless File.directory?(File.join(Rails.root, 'vendor/plugins/rspec'))
# config.gem 'rspec-rails',      :lib => false, :version => '>=1.3.2' unless File.directory?(File.join(Rails.root, 'vendor/plugins/rspec-rails'))

RAILS_ROOT/config/environments/test.rb

# Settings specified here will take precedence over those in config/environment.rb

# The test environment is used exclusively to run your application's
# test suite.  You never need to work with it otherwise.  Remember that
# your test database is "scratch space" for the test suite and is wiped
# and recreated between test runs.  Don't rely on the data there!
config.cache_classes = true

# Log error messages when you accidentally call methods on nil.
config.whiny_nils = true

# Show full error reports and disable caching
config.action_controller.consider_all_requests_local = true
config.action_controller.perform_caching             = false

# Configure memcached
FA_MEMCACHED_SERVER = '127.0.0.1'
FA_MEMCACHED_PORT = '11211'
config.cache_store = :mem_cache_store, [FA_MEMCACHED_SERVER, FA_MEMCACHED_PORT].join(':'), { :namespace => Rails.env.to_s }

# Disable request forgery protection in test environment
config.action_controller.allow_forgery_protection    = false

# Tell ActionMailer not to deliver emails to the real world.
# The :test delivery method accumulates sent emails in the
# ActionMailer::Base.deliveries array.
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :test
config.log_level = :debug

RAILS_ROOT/features/support/env.rb

# IMPORTANT: This file is generated by cucumber-rails - edit at your own peril.
# It is recommended to regenerate this file in the future when you upgrade to a 
# newer version of cucumber-rails. Consider adding your own code to a new file 
# instead of editing this one. Cucumber will automatically load all features/**/*.rb
# files.

ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= "cucumber"
require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../config/environment')

require 'cucumber/formatter/unicode' # Remove this line if you don't want Cucumber Unicode support
require 'cucumber/rails/rspec'
require 'cucumber/rails/world'
require 'cucumber/rails/active_record'
require 'cucumber/web/tableish'

# allows checking outgoing email existant and content
require 'email_spec'
require 'email_spec/cucumber'

require 'capybara/rails'
require 'capybara/cucumber'
require 'capybara/session'
require 'cucumber/rails/capybara_javascript_emulation' # Lets you click links with onclick javascript handlers without using @culerity or @javascript
# Capybara defaults to XPath selectors rather than Webrat's default of CSS3. In
# order to ease the transition to Capybara we set the default here. If you'd
# prefer to use XPath just remove this line and adjust any selectors in your
# steps to use the XPath syntax.
Capybara.default_selector = :css

# If you set this to false, any error raised from within your app will bubble 
# up to your step definition and out to cucumber unless you catch it somewhere
# on the way. You can make Rails rescue errors and render error pages on a
# per-scenario basis by tagging a scenario or feature with the @allow-rescue tag.
#
# If you set this to true, Rails will rescue all errors and render error
# pages, more or less in the same way your application would behave in the
# default production environment. It's not recommended to do this for all
# of your scenarios, as this makes it hard to discover errors in your application.
ActionController::Base.allow_rescue = false

# If you set this to true, each scenario will run in a database transaction.
# You can still turn off transactions on a per-scenario basis, simply tagging 
# a feature or scenario with the @no-txn tag. If you are using Capybara,
# tagging with @culerity or @javascript will also turn transactions off.
#
# If you set this to false, transactions will be off for all scenarios,
# regardless of whether you use @no-txn or not.
#
# Beware that turning transactions off will leave data in your database 
# after each scenario, which can lead to hard-to-debug failures in 
# subsequent scenarios. If you do this, we recommend you create a Before
# block that will explicitly put your database in a known state.
Cucumber::Rails::World.use_transactional_fixtures = true

# How to clean your database when transactions are turned off. See
# http://github.com/bmabey/database_cleaner for more info.
if defined?(ActiveRecord::Base)
  begin
    require 'database_cleaner'
    require 'database_cleaner/cucumber'
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation, {:except => %w[roles]}
  rescue LoadError => ignore_if_database_cleaner_not_present
  end
end

RAILS_ROOT/spec/spec_helper.rb

# This file is copied to ~/spec when you run 'ruby script/generate rspec'
# from the project root directory.
ENV["RAILS_ENV"] = 'test'
require File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__),'..','config','environment'))
require 'spec/autorun'
require 'spec/rails'

# Uncomment the next line to use webrat's matchers
#require 'webrat/integrations/rspec-rails'

# Requires supporting files with custom matchers and macros, etc,
# in ./support/ and its subdirectories.
Dir[File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__),'support','**','*.rb'))].each {|f| require f}

Spec::Runner.configure do |config|
  # If you're not using ActiveRecord you should remove these
  # lines, delete config/database.yml and disable :active_record
  # in your config/boot.rb
  config.use_transactional_fixtures = true
  config.use_instantiated_fixtures  = false
  config.fixture_path = RAILS_ROOT + '/spec/fixtures/'

  # == Fixtures
  #
  # You can declare fixtures for each example_group like this:
  #   describe "...." do
  #     fixtures :table_a, :table_b
  #
  # Alternatively, if you prefer to declare them only once, you can
  # do so right here. Just uncomment the next line and replace the fixture
  # names with your fixtures.
  #
  # config.global_fixtures = :table_a, :table_b
  #
  # If you declare global fixtures, be aware that they will be declared
  # for all of your examples, even those that don't use them.
  #
  # You can also declare which fixtures to use (for example fixtures for test/fixtures):
  #
  # config.fixture_path = RAILS_ROOT + '/spec/fixtures/'
  #
  # == Mock Framework
  #
  # RSpec uses its own mocking framework by default. 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
  #
  # == Notes
  #
  # For more information take a look at Spec::Runner::Configuration and Spec::Runner
end

RAILS_ROOT/Gemfile

group :test, :cucumber do
  gem "cucumber-rails", "0.3.2"
  gem "rspec-rails", "1.3.3"
  gem "database_cleaner", "0.5.0"
  gem "capybara", "0.3.9"
  gem "selenium-client", "1.2.18"
  gem "sqlite3-ruby",  "1.3.1"
  gem "email_spec", "~> 0.6.3", :require => 'spec'
  gem "factory_girl"
  gem "launchy"
end

group :development do
  gem "factory_girl"
  gem "ruby-prof"
end

Answer 1

On RAILS_ROOT/Gemfile

do: add specific test-only gems to this group:

group :test do
  gem 'cucumber-rails'
  gem 'capybara'
  gem 'database_cleaner'
end

Instead of setting them to be used on development and everywhere else too. This should work.

P.S: edit the code above to set the gems you'll be using for your test, I just copy/pasted the ones Im using on the project I have currently open as an example.

Answer 2

When you upgraded to Rails 3, did you perhaps do a global find and replace on RAILS_ENV?

Is the first line of test_helper.rb something other than this?

ENV["RAILS_ENV"] = "test"

In the actual environment variables, it should still be RAILS_ENV, not ::Rails.env, so make sure you don't have ENV["Rails.env"] = "test" for that line of code.

Make sure it looks like it used to. Not that I would know from having made this mistake personally... :-)

Answer 3

Not only config files are relevant to setting up rails environment.

Check your lib/tasks/cucumber.rake file and if it doesn't contain it already add one of the following lines to it depending on your rails version (I added it after 'begin' line):

ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'cucumber' #for rails2

Rails.env ||= ActiveSupport::StringInquirer.new('cucumber') #for rails3

Notice that if you set environment to development in application.rb directly for example, then your tests will run in development.

Also there's another way to set environment to cucumber. If you're running rails with Passenger and Apache for example, then it is possible to run cucumber test in cucumber environment by adding "RailsEnv cucumber" line to your virtualhost configuration.