How to get Cucumber/Capybara/Mechanize to work against external non-rails site

Question

I\'m trying to do BDD on a Google App Script. I understand that in principle I should be able to use some combination of Cucumber, Capybara and Mechanize to do BDD on a non

Answer 1

If you are not using Rails, set Capybara.app to your rack app:

It was meant to be read as:

If the application that you are testing is a Rack app, but not Rails, set Capybara.app to your Rack app:

Capybara's README was updated as the result of this question.

As you want to run tests against external application, you should set Capybara.app_host instead of Capybara.app.

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I haven't used capybara-mechanize but I think it may be not the best driver to use to test external non-Rack application. Mechanize inherits from Racktest and Racktest is for testing apps with Rack interface (mostly Rails). If your app doesn't have Rack interface, then capybara-mechanize may be not the best choice.

I recommend you to use the built-in selenium, poltergeist, capybara-webkit or terminus

Also your code can be written a bit nicer using Capybara.configure:

Capybara.configure do |config|
  config.run_server = false
  config.default_driver = :selenium
  config.app_host = 'https://www.google.com' # change url
end

Answer 2

From Jeroen van Dijk on this Google group message, just set your Capybara.app to something that evaluates to true. i.e.

Capybara.app = "make sure this isn't nil"

As long as Capybara.run_server is set to false, it will not ever try to boot the app. It is working thus far for me.