How do I re-use Capybara sessions between tests?

Question

I want to keep on using the same session and by that I mean Rails\' session between various Test::Unit integration tests that use Capybara. The Capybara::Sess

Answer 1

If what you are doing is trying to string together individual examples into a story (cucumber style, but without cucumber), you can use a gem called rspec-steps to accomplish this. For example, normally this won't work:

describe "logging in" do
  it "when I visit the sign-in page" do 
    visit "/login"
  end
  it "and I fill in my registration info and click submit" do
    fill_in :username, :with => 'Foo'
    fill_in :password, :with => 'foobar'
    click_on "Submit"
  end
  it "should show a successful login" do
    page.should have_content("Successfully logged in")
  end
end

Because rspec rolls back all of its instance variables, sessions, cookies, etc.

If you install rspec-steps (note: currently not compatible with rspec newer than 2.9), you can replace 'describe' with 'steps' and Rspec and capybara will preserve state between the examples, allowing you to build a longer story, e.g.:

steps "logging in" do
  it "when I visit the sign-in page" #... etc.
  it "and I fill in" # ... etc.
  it "should show a successful" # ... etc.
end