Testing for broken links in a rails application

Question

I have an existing rails application, where i want to test for broken links. which testing should i use integration testing or Rspec? Am new to BDD.

Thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

I think it depends on why you are wanting to "test" for broken links.

Scenario 1) Ensuring URLs entered by users are correct might use a method like this:

def active_link?(url)
  uri = URI.parse(url)
  response = nil
  Net::HTTP.start(uri.host, uri.port) { |http|
    response = http.head(uri.path.size > 0 ? uri.path : "/")
  }  
  return response.code == "200"
end

You can then use that in your Rspec tests:

active_link?('http://example.com').should be

Scenario 2) You just want to make sure all the links on your site work:

If this is the case, you might try using the Unix 'wget' command:

wget --spider -r -l 1 --header='User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0' http://example.com 2>&1 | grep -B 2 '404'

With Scenario 2, it will dump out all 404s to your terminal screen. It's a relatively simple matter to put that into a rake command; Jason Seifer has a great blog post on that (http://jasonseifer.com/2010/04/06/rake-tutorial)